in its neoliberal version. exposed as hollow bearers of debt servitude that can never be paid off.
.The Fabric of Struggles Benjamin Noys
I Barely twenty years have passed since the collapse of actually-existing socialism and now the crisis of actually-existing capitalism. is upon us. or merely the prelude to the ‘creative destruction’ that will kick-start a new round of accumulation. is still obscure. The shrill capitalist triumphalism of the 1990s. The commodities that make up the capitalist way-of-life have turned malignant. Whether this is terminal crisis. ring more than a little hollow in the frozen desert of burst financial bubbles and devalorization. The cry ‘No New Deal’ goes up as wealth is transferred in huge amounts to save the financial sector. We are prepared for yet another round of sacrifice as structural adjustment and ‘shock doctrine’ return to the center of global capitalism after extensive testing on its self-defined ‘peripheries’. entropic drift. or the bellicose equation of capitalism with democracy that defined the ’00s ‘war on terror’.

than forces together very different perspectives and analyses.Communization and its Discontents In this situation new waves and forms of struggle have emerged in dispersed and inchoate forms. The concept of communization emerged from currents of the French ultra-left in the late 1960s and early 1970s. a nickname. communism as a particular activity and process. Obviously at the heart of the word is communism and. but has gained resonance as a way of posing the problem of struggle today. not least. postautonomists. II This collection is dedicated to a critical questioning of the concept of communization. In each case I want to treat these points as sites of dispute. as the shift to communization suggests. the ‘imaginary party’. Here I want to give some initial points of orientation. especially between the theorisations of the well-known contemporary French
8
. and it has often been used more as a slogan. and in particular to analysing its discontents – the problems. We have also seen a new language being used to theorise and think these struggles: ‘the human strike’. It is not easy to define what the word communization refers to. and it challenges the despotism of capitalism that treats us as sources of value. etc. militant. the strange and spectral word ‘communization’. What we find ‘in’ communization is often a weird mixing-up of insurrectionist anarchism. by analyzing the communizing arguments that pose struggle as immediate. as well as more explicitly ‘communizing’ currents. which are explored further in the contributions that follow. ‘clandestinity’ and. it contests the tendency to affirm or adopt an alternative counter-identity (worker. such as Théorie Communiste and Endnotes. and as antiidentity. immanent.). anti-political currents. dictate or pre-empt struggles. groups like the Invisible Committee. questions and difficulties that traverse it. but what that is requires some further exploration. activist. anarchist. the communist ultra-left. It draws attention to the exhaustion of existing forms of organization that have tried to lead. or even worse a ‘brand’.

also publishing under the name ‘The Invisible Committee’ (henceforth I will refer to them as ‘Tiqqun’ for convenience). by arguing that communization implies the immediacy of communism in the process of revolution. They regard capitalism as porous or. In fact. however. and the less-known but explicitly communizing currents of Théorie Communiste (TC) and Endnotes. but again this can lead in very different directions. regarding such forms of struggle as mired in capitalism and often moralistic. in this perspective we can’t make any transition to communism but must live it as a reality now to ensure its eventual victory. in Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation. TC and Endnotes give this ‘immediacy’ a rather different sense. indicating the limits of our forms of struggle and indicating only possible new lines of attack. For Tiqqun and others influenced by anarchist prefigurative politics this immediacy means that we must begin enacting communism now. no stage of socialism required before we can achieve the stage of communism. On the other hand. Tiqqun regard capitalism as globally dominant. From the commune to ‘commoning’. ‘holey’. within capitalism. on the other. The point here is that communization requires that we start thinking communism from within the immanent conditions of global capitalism rather than from a putatively radical or communist ‘outside’. and so no need to ‘build’ communism. What does it mean to say that communization is or should be immediate? It suggests there is no transition to communism. they are deeply suspicious of a prefigurative or alternative politics. These differences are also reflected in the posing of the communization in terms of immanence.1 Instead. contemporary struggles can only be negatively prefigurative. if anything. has a very different meaning in different hands.Introduction radical grouping associated with the journal Tiqqun. on the one hand. or into which revolt can slip away from power. but also see it as leaving spaces and times through which revolt can emerge. from cyber-activism to new ‘forms-of-life’.2 This kind of ‘enclave’ theory is a familiar
9
. This.

Many in the communizing current adopt a variant of Marx’s distinction. however. but insist that this is not an identity. and other practices of ‘commoning’. this is often a point of contention. We cannot reinforce a ‘workers’ identity’. or try to replace this with another identity. Again we might not be surprised to see that TC and Endnotes disagree. or post-identity models that intimate new ‘forms-of-life’. In terms of the contesting of ‘identity’. Instead. but rather a mode of self-abolishing. They too regard capitalism as dominant. and so links with the claim for a prefigurative immediacy. Tiqqun develop a new clandestine or ‘invisible’ identity of the militant that escapes capitalist control and capture. Again. to activists. or ‘line of flight’. For example.3 between formal and real subsumption. peasants may still work in the fields in the way they always have but now they are
10
. they instead prefer the language of contemporary theory: ‘whatever singularities’. and involves capital subsuming an existing form of production ‘as it finds it’. There is no ‘outside’. Formal subsumption is the general form of capitalist domination. to communal gardening. from the unpublished sixth chapter of capital the ‘Results of the Immediate Process of Production’. communes themselves. but as a contradictory totality fissured by class struggles between proletariat and capital. III If there are disagreements in the forms which the analysis of struggle should take there seems to be initial agreement about what communization opposes: capitalism. to squats. Refusing the ‘old’ identity models of Marxism. as well as the ‘new’ models of identity politics. the working class or proletariat. This kind of formulation appeals to struggles in progress.Communization and its Discontents strategy. the negativity of the proletariat consists in the fact it can only operate by abolishing itself. In contrast TC and Endnotes retain the classical Marxist language of the proletariat. but only a thinking through of this immanent contradiction and antagonism secreted within capitalist exploitation of labor to extract value. ranging from the Italian social centers.

In this mode of subsumption. capital generates absolute surplus-value.e. which reaches its apogee in the Russian Revolution. Here compulsion increases relative surplus-value by the use of machinery. encouraging the passage from formal to real subsumption through ‘socialist accumulation’. So. While Marx. you need to produce a surplus to generate income to live. social welfare. and can only do so by demanding extension to the working day. 5 With the advance of real subsumption. the intensification of labor and the remaking of the production process. In the argument of TC this shift is linked to cycles of struggle. It is real subsumption which produces a truly capitalist mode of production. and other forms of Keynesian control. when workers now
11
.Introduction compelled to take their goods to market to realise value. Within communization. surplusvalue can only be generated by forcing work beyond the amount necessary for self-reproduction. in the industrial form of the factory during the latter half of the 19th century. rather than to pay off a feudal lord. and especially for TC. although this compulsion does not tend to happen directly but through economic functions. and class struggle expresses itself in the affirmation of a pre-capitalist identity and ‘moral economy’.4 the periodizing argument suggests that we have shifted from formal subsumption to real subsumption. and others like Endnotes. Here the forms of struggle actually become ‘internal’ to capitalism. Marx argues. These ‘revolutions’ tend to reinforce capitalism. In the initial phase of capitalist accumulation we have formal subsumption. see formal and real subsumption as intertwined processes that have developed with capitalism and take different forms. and lead to the theology of labor and the oxymoron of the ‘workers’ state’. In this new cycle of struggles central is the independent workers’ identity. and TC call this form of struggle ‘programmatism’. Marx’s distinction is often taken as a model of historical periodization. we see a new antagonism of the worker versus capitalism. as the relation becomes mediated through unions. This stands in contrast to real subsumption. in which capital revolutionizes the actual mode of labor to produce the specifically capitalist mode of production. i. This ‘programmatism’ comes into crisis with the struggles of the 1960s and 1970s.

Communization. Again. This re-making was. however. The extension of real subsumption over life. but reject the bluntness of the periodization
12
. regards the passage to the dominance of real subsumption as requiring and generating new forms of struggle and antagonism that entail the abandoning of the affirmation of the worker and ‘workers’ power’. a re-making of the world in the conformity to capital and the crisis of the identity of the ‘worker’. differences emerge at this point. It is taken today by certain currents of primitivism or anti-civilization anarchism. It could seem to imply the pessimistic conclusion that ‘resistance is futile’. that capitalism is a monstrous alien subject that vampirically draws all of life within itself (to mix Marx’s gothic metaphors). Negri and the post-autonomists tend to argue for the emergence of the power of the ‘multitude’.7 while Endnotes accept the diagnosis of the crisis of programmatism. or even to the origin of language itself.Communization and its Discontents abolish their identities and flee the factory. and many other post-autonomists. In the capitalist counter-attack.6 Such an analysis is shared by Jacques Camatte. what Italian autonomists called the ‘social factory’. Antonio Negri. in contrast. Such a position was visible in the Frankfurt school’s positing of a ‘totally-administered’ or ‘one-dimensional’ society. an invariant of the capitalist mode of production. generalises struggles. central to the project of neoliberalism. of course. which desperately try to recover the few remaining fragments of ‘non-capitalist’ life and backdate the origins of oppression to the Neolithic agricultural revolution. we witness a second phase of real subsumption. which escape or flee or declare war on the forms and structures of real subsumption TC argue for new self-abolishing relations of struggle as the contradictions sharpen and the ‘proletariat’ is no longer a viable identity in capitalism and so communism only really becomes possible now Gilles Dauvé and Karl Nesic prefer to see communization as an immanent possibility of struggles across the history of capitalism. which is always ready to burst through the capitalist integument and install communism Tiqqun stress new ‘singularities’ or ‘forms-of-life’.

It is capitalism that forms the terrain and ‘fabric of struggles’ which communization tries to engage with and theorise. IV I want to baldly state some of the interconnected problems that seem to immediately face communization as a theory. to have led to any rebound to a self-abolishing model of proletarian negativity or the ‘multitude’. and the widespread disenchantment with social democracy.Introduction of subsumption by TC and others. still depends on a minimal teleology that implies new forms of possible revolution. The first is that the final collapse of actually-existing socialism in 1989. It is also class struggle and capitalist responses to that struggle that have re-posed the crisis of the workers’ movement and pose the need to create new modes of thinking contemporary struggles. and different understandings lead to very different conclusions. not least for the working class.
13
. does not seem. or that their lack of appearance is a sign of a transition beyond ‘programmatism’. or ‘whatever singularities’. how we think and understand the form and history of capitalism is a crucial point of debate to develop forms of struggle against it. unions. still nascent. this doesn’t seem to offer much reassurance. but in the context of capitalist crisis. While ‘programmatism’ is obviously in crisis a replacement is not evident. or other ‘new’ modes of struggle. the emergence of an alternative ‘real movement’ is hard to detect to say the least. Without wishing to collapse these important differences we can see the emphasis on the ‘horizon’ of capitalism as dominant. While the workers’ states were often terrible and bloody failures. which prefers to only negatively trace ‘emergent’ forms of struggle and their limits. That said. and so still has to confront this problem. and other ‘traditional’ affirmations of the worker as means of resistance. it could always be argued that these forms of struggle are still emerging. Of course. Even the austerity of the TC position. and capitalist-induced ecological crisis. even in the moment of crisis. as yet.

In particular the end of the ‘workers’ standpoint’.’10 Pending proof of this ‘inventiveness’.9 The alternative articulations of possible agents of change. is that the triumph of ‘real subsumption’. This leads to a third problem. This is true for those who emphasise communizing now. but rather the global dominance of capitalism or ‘Empire’. the end of the classical proletariat. i. dispersed and differential? TC pose this question when they ask: ‘How can a “unity” arise. Even if we don’t think in terms of real subsumption.Communization and its Discontents A second problem. there is a risk that communization becomes a valorization of only fleeting moments of revolt. of small chinks in which the light of revolution penetrates capitalist darkness. their unsatisfactory answer: ‘We do not know… But class struggle has often showed us its infinite inventiveness. to destroy or counter a global capitalism). because then we must answer how the process of communizing can be coordinated in a revolution that will be a geographically and temporally striated. or that it
14
. which I’ve already noted in passing. While TC insists on the proletariat as conceptual marker. in a general movement of class struggle. that is not in fact a unity but an inter-activity?’. or time. they have to struggle with its empirical non-emergence. which integrates the reproduction of the proletariat to the self-reproduction of capital. it’s hard to see how it can coordinate or develop such ‘moments’ of communization globally across the social field (as it would have to. in which case how do such moments come together and avoid remaining merely ‘alternative’? It is also true if we regard communizing as intrinsic to revolution. debates on what we are aiming to achieve. we still have to confront the issue of whether it can be defeated. The ways in which capitalism permeates and modulates the whole of life (what Deleuze called ‘the society of control’8) leaves us with little leverage to resist. for resistance. While communization insists on immediacy and the abandonment of debates about ‘transition’ or teleology. seems to allow very little space. and how.e. seems to deprive us of an agency to make the mass changes communization would require. such as immaterial workers or ‘whatever singularities’. by other currents of communization are very thinly-specified.

etc. and the strategic or tactical forms that resistance might or will take. It is to the necessity of thinking and theorizing these problems and others in the light of ‘communization’ that this collection is devoted. These are. the nature of capitalism and the possible agents who might resist this social formation.
V The chapters. Certainly. and it
15
. and deliberately. speak for themselves. What is as yet unclear is what forms of struggle will make ‘the poetry of the future’. workers’ councils. but for any attempts to make radical change. and the stress it places on engaging with them. but rather to suggest that the difficulty in specifying agents of change can also flow into the difficulties in specifying the contents of change. communization was right to critique the formalism of the left. they do not speak in the same voice. of course. Also. without any substantial account of how that might take place.) communism would unfold. what collection could be?. that could only ever argue that once we had the correct form (Leninist party. not only problems for communization. What I want to stress is the acuity with which communization allows us to pose these problems. Communization as a problematic links together issues of the current state of struggle. and their seeming ‘disappearance’ in traditional forms. or to rehash debates concerning Leninism (debates that might well be important). rather than presuming they will be dissolved in some rush to ‘praxis’. or even agreement that communization is the best way of posing it. which follow. of course.Introduction become the promise of a total revolution that will achieve its aim in process. what TC calls its ‘programmatism’. this collection itself is in process – it is certainly not exhaustive. and certainly. This is not to call for a return to the ‘party’ form. or better interventions. If communization is a way of stating a problem then there is no requirement for agreement on what that problem is.

which deals with how we conceptualize our contemporary political situation and how we conceptualize capitalism itself.11 The first king uses the tradi16
.Communization and its Discontents doesn’t aim at closure. it is in the re-working of more familiar concepts that we can assess the originality of the communizing hypothesis. to use the word in the Situationist sense. Through the sharpening and analysis of these contrasts it becomes possible to assess the nature and originality of the communizing hypothesis. but rather to pose as a problem the kinds and forms of political (or non-political. or anti-political) action that are possible today. is not to provide a new reified recipe book for revolution. the section ‘No Future?’ takes the slogan that was common to both punk and neoliberalism and turns it into a question. labyrinth or maze. and the collection as a whole. VI In his story ‘The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths’ Jorge Luis Borges describes the competition between two kings to construct the perfect. alongside the unevenness of capitalist power. We begin with the ‘moment of communization’ – a series of texts that frame the competing definitions of communization. This is the question of the possible futures of the project of communization in regards to two key areas of our contemporary situation: the problem of gender / sexuality. The aim of this section. especially the ‘barricade’. Again. the commons and the question of revolutionary violence. especially of capitalism in crisis. The aim here is to reflect on the problem of the contemporary forms of capitalism. and so impossible to escape. Finally. The next section is ‘Frames of Struggle’. The section ‘Strategies of Struggle’ considers how communization has drawn on and re-tooled ‘traditional’ modes of struggle. and to assess how we might understand the horizon of a seemingly ‘totalitarian’ capitalism. and the problem of the new models and forms of digital practice. of these interventions. But I do want to provide some general indications of the ‘drift’. and especially the conflict between those associated with TC/Endnotes and Tiqqun.

and to begin to detect the struggles that will (re) make this terrain.Introduction tional method of constructing a highly-complex series of tunnels. To start to find what paths there might be. Many other paths are possible. but in its combined and uneven development. Capitalism is not a ‘featureless’ terrain or ‘smooth space’. in fact in the desert we face not so much a ‘garden of forking paths’ but the infinite multiplicity of paths we cannot even yet trace. For Tiqqun we are living the ‘deepening of the desert’. to not accept the (capitalist) desert as ‘natural’ phenomenon. but the absence of any paths. The impossibility of this labyrinth lies not in the choice of paths. In his turn the second king lays waste to the first king’s lands and casts him into a labyrinth impossible to defeat: the desert. it is proving to be a labyrinth that is hard to traverse. resulting in a terrible labyrinth which the second king only escapes from by the intervention of God.
17
. a posing of the problem. this collection is merely. including in the moment of globalized crisis. Communization is not our compass. the neutralisation of means to orient ourselves and escape the ‘labyrinth’ of capital. but essentially.12 This certainly overstates the case. So. and this collection does not exhaustively map this labyrinth.

.

The Moment of Communization
.

.

1
.

.

Of these. concepts in part derived from the works of a more Marxist French ultra-left – and the convenient presence in both of these reference
. A number of factors have contributed to this. a language inflected by typically grandiloquent Tiqqunisms. In addition to this. the most prominent being the coming into fashion of various texts. and on the other.13 The confluence in this Californian literature of. and the ‘Tarnac 9’ who gained the doubtful prestige of being at the center of a major ‘terrorist’ scandal – has been by far the most influential. The Coming Insurrection – associated with the French journal Tiqqun.What are we to do? Endnotes
The term ‘communization’ has recently become something of a buzzword. the voluble literature produced by autumn 2009’s wave of Californian student struggles – a literature partly inspired by such French texts – has been a significant factor. on the one hand.

if anything. at least. if we were to attempt to divine some common content in the clutter of theories and practices grouped under such terms. in all but the most abstract sense. But this communization is. an understanding which we will sketch in what follows. a frisson of radical immediatism. something other than that which has been debated for some thirty years amongst the obscure communist groups who have lent the most content to this term. having at least the sparkle of something new to it. We will thus concern ourselves here only with the two usages of the word that are at stake in the current discourse of communization: that derived from texts such as The Coming Insurrection. even if it bears traces of its ancestors’ features. and the support of some eloquent-sounding French literature. Of course. here. gelling nicely with the sentiments of an already-existent insurrectionist anarchism. ‘communization’ was never the private property of such-and-such groups. a vague new incarnation of the simple idea that the revolution is something that we must do now. Théorie Communiste and other post-68 French communists. and that derived from writings by Troploin. This communization appears as a fashionable stand-in for slightly more venerable buzzwords such as ‘autonomy’. or of a continuous ‘communizationist’ tendency
24
. these two usages both proliferated from France into Anglophone debates in recent years. But it would be a mistake to take this coincidence for the sign of a single French debate over communization. Recently some have begun to speak. and may perhaps be illuminated by their theories. for ourselves. ‘communization’ – has contributed to the appearance of a somewhat mythological discourse around this word. we would be left with only the thinnest abstraction.Communization and its Discontents points of a fairly unusual term. a certain minor place in the general lexicon of left-wing tradition as a process of rendering communal or common. As it happens. It has. with similar intended meaning. But such general concepts are not interesting in themselves. It is primarily from these latter writings – those of Théorie Communiste (TC) in particular – that we derive our own understanding of communization. of ongoing processes of ‘commonization’. a process in which we have played a part. This communization is.

as we shall see. It is because long-running debates related to the concept of communization – debates in which we have participated – have become falsely associated with the theories presented in texts such as The Coming Insurrection and Call. charged as ‘terrorists’ on the meagre basis of allegations that they wrote a book and committed a minor act of sabotage. and the near-simultaneity with which some of these works became more widely known. the question is which mediations are absent? If the tone of the following text is often polemical. But our intention is not simply to polemicize from the standpoint of some alternative theory. broken fragments of a
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. is that they can be said to signal a certain insistence on immediacy in thinking about how a communist revolution happens. for example. they do not simply present incorrect theories. The limited availability of relevant works in English.The Moment of Communization within which the authors of The Coming Insurrection and. What is common to these usages at most. Insofar as it is possible to grasp the determinate circumstances which produce texts like this. and are thereby in danger of getting lost in the creeping fog that these texts have summoned. a certain traditional predisposition in relation to France. but the Anglophone reception of ‘communization’ in general. an artefact of the Anglophone reception of various unrelated works. the partial. They present rather. one ‘immediate’ is not the same as another. But. It has thus become necessary to make the distinction: the ‘communization theory’ now spoken of in the Anglosphere is largely an imaginary entity. The Anglosphere has a peculiar tendency to take every crowing of some Gallic cock as a cue to get busy in the potting shed with its own theoretical confabulations. this is not because we take pleasure in criticising people already subject to a very public manhandling by the French state. add to this a major political scandal. its theory and politics. and it seems it is practically unable to contain the excitement. TC represent divergent positions.14 What is at stake is not only these texts. surely contributed to the confusion. probably helped.

for us this does not take the form of a practical prescription. since anything short of this leaves capital with its obliging partner. In attempting to hold fast to the general movement of the capitalist class relation. What is most at stake. and it is in the directness of this self-abolition that communization can be said to signify a certain ‘immediacy’. the transitional period places the real revolution on a receding horizon. such an overcoming must necessarily be the direct self-abolition of the working class. rather. when the proletariat would be able to realise communism. having already taken hold of production and/ or the state. gender distinction. In particular. and thereby the theoretical constructs which they produce. ‘communization’ does not imply some injunction to start making the revolution right away. For us this is not a strategic question. capital. Setting out on the basis of the continued existence of the working class. is the question of what the revolution is. meanwhile perpetuating that which it is supposed to overcome. ready to continue the dance of accumulation. or on an individual basis. it may also expose their limits. Communization signifies the process of this direct self-abolition. Communization is typically opposed to a traditional notion of the transitional period which was always to take place after the revolution. communist theory may shed light on the character of such moments. their interrogation may draw out something about the character of the class relation as a whole. ‘communization’ is the name of an answer to this question. And. If communization signals a certain immediacy in how the revolution happens. in so doing. legal form. Insofar as such constructs are symptomatic of the general character of the historical moment. etc. the self-reproduction of the capitalist class relation.Communization and its Discontents historical moment grasped in thought. elisions and internal contradictions. since these matters have been settled by historical developments – the end of the
26
. The content of such an answer necessarily depends on what is to be overcome: that is. and the complex of social forms which are implicated in this reproduction – value-form. state form.

Indeed. what is held in common is the counterpart to an appropriation. just as it would involve the undoing of private appropriation.15 For us. With the growing superfluity of the working class to production – its tendential reduction to a mere surplus population – and the resultantly tenuous character of the wage form as the essential meeting point of the twin circuits of reproduction. And while some might valorize a sharing that facilitates a certain level of subsistence beyond what the wage enables. and different shapes now inhabit its horizon. it can only be delusional to conceive revolution in terms of workers’ power. The class struggle has outlived programmatism. communization does not signify some general positive process of ‘sharing’ or ‘making common’. scientific knowledge shared through academic publications. Sharing as such – if this has any meaning at all – can hardly be understood as involving this undoing of capitalist relations. the disappearance of positive working class identity. without contradiction. Yet it is still the working class which must abolish itself. standards and protocols shared between rival capitals because they are recognized as being in their common interest. It signifies the specific revolutionary undoing of the relations of property constitutive of the capitalist class relation. In such cases. for various kinds of ‘sharing’ or ‘making common’ can easily be shown to play important roles within capitalist society without in any way impeding capitalist accumulation. measuring reality against mental constructs which bear no historical actuality. To hold to councilist or Leninist conceptions of revolution now is utopian. the absence of any kind of workers’ power on the horizon: it is no longer possible to imagine a transition to communism on the basis of a prior victory of the working class as working class.The Moment of Communization programmatic workers’ movement. risk shared via insurance. a dynamic of communization would involve the undoing of such forms of ‘sharing’. in a world dominated by the reproduction of the capitalist class relation such practices can occur only at the margins of this
27
. resources shared within firms. As such. they are often essential to – or even constitutive in – that accumulation: consumption goods shared within families.

they are not revolutionary in themselves. and it certainly cannot prescribe particular skills. since they are part of that which is to be abolished. The determination of an individual act as ‘communizing’ flows only from the overall movement of which it is part. A conception of the revolution as such an accumulation is premised on a quantitative extension which is supposed to provoke a qualitative transformation. The logic of the movement that abolishes this totality necessarily differs from that which applies at the level of the concrete individual or group: it should go without saying that no individual or group can overcome the reproduction of the capitalist class relation through their own actions. and as such. In this it is not unlike the problematic of the growing-over of everyday struggles into revolution which was one of the salient characteristics of the programmatic epoch.16 In contrast to these linear conceptions of revolution. Communization is thus not a form of prefigurative revolutionary practice of the sort that diverse anarchisms aspire to be. in the rift that opens as this struggle meets its limit and is pushed beyond it. since it does not have any positive existence prior to a revolutionary situation.Communization and its Discontents reproduction. While it is possible to see the question of communization as in some sense posed by the dynamic of the present capitalist class relation. Communization occurs only at the limit of a struggle. such as lock-picking or bone-setting. immediate practice in the here and now. Communization is a movement at the level of the totality. through which that totality is abolished.17 What advice it can give is primarily negative: the social forms implicated in the reproduction of the capitalist class relation will not be instruments of the revolution. communization does
28
. by which insurrectionary subjects to heaven go. as so many roads. not from the act itself. as if all that was needed was a certain accumulation of such acts to a critical point. and it would therefore be wrong to think of the revolution in terms of the sum of already-communizing acts. communization is the product of a qualitative shift within the dynamic of class struggle itself. as alternative or supplementary means of survival. Communization thus has little positive advice to give us about particular.

anarchist. Instead of a concrete. ‘the deployment of an archipelago of worlds’.18 do these pronouncements amount to anything more than
29
.The Moment of Communization not yet appear directly as a form of practice. call it what you wish’. these limits. The theory of communization alerts us to the limits inherent in such struggles. rather than in spite of. and those with ‘a disposition to forms of communication so intense that. when put into practice. leftist. This does not mean that we should merely await communization as some sort of messianic arrival – in fact. empire. or on the basis of any real material. there are ‘those who can hear’ the call. even though they do not yet present themselves as the revolution. from a contemplative standpoint. The reader is beseeched to take sides with this ‘we’ – the ‘we of a position’ – to join it in the imminent demise of ‘capitalism. In these texts. ‘the party of insurgents’ – but most of all by that ever-present and always amorphous positivity: we.’ Regardless of their statements to the contrary. do not even properly ask the question of what the revolution is. and ultra-leftist alike: how will the overcoming of the capitalist class relation take place. and indeed it is attentive to the possibilities of a real revolutionary rupture opening up because of. this is not an option. civilization. and those who cannot. it will be made by ‘friendships’. historical situation. This is a question which takes a specific historical form in the face of the self-evident bankruptcy of the old programmatic notions. communization is an answer to the question of what the revolution is. given that it is impossible for the proletariat to affirm itself as a class yet we are still faced with the problem of this relation? Texts such as Call or The Coming Insurrection however. by ‘the formation of sensibility as a force’. Involvement in the class struggle is not a matter of a political practice which can be arbitrarily chosen. For us then. or as some set of individuals with the right ideas about such practice. for engagement in the dynamic of the capitalist class relation is not something that can be opted out of. contradictory relation. for in these texts the problem has already been evaporated into a conceptual miasma. the revolution will be made not by any existing class. those who perpetuate ‘the desert’. for that matter. Struggles demand our participation. ‘an other side of reality’. they snatch from the enemy most of its force. nor into.

But the problem cannot rest only with this ‘they’. the commune etc. Happy that the we of the revolution does not need any real definition. these alternatives will not turn out to have been impossible after all. black-blocking activist milieu makes it imperative for them to either find new practices in which to engage. civilization. yes. since it no longer has to be an alternative. and who still really feel despite the badness of the world. yet the exhaustion of the summit-hopping. empire.19 The authors correctly recognize the impossibility of developing any real autonomy to ‘what is held in common’ within capitalist society. empire etc) that is to be undone by – at the worst points of Call – the Authentic Ones who have forged ‘intense’ friendships. the alternative. The complexity of actual social relations. more or less. But all of this is without any clear notion of what is to be undone through such a dynamic. their generalization is to be the condition of their possibility. But the question in this case is the ‘what should we do?’ posed by the conclusion of the wave of struggles that had the anti-globalization movement at its center. all that is to be overcome is arrogated to the they – an entity which can remain equally abstract: an ill-defined generic nobodaddy (capitalism. thereby funda30
.Communization and its Discontents the self-affirmations of a self-identifying radical milieu? In this more insurrectionist incarnation.. Provided the struggle is successful. civilization. communization emerges as an answer to a real historical question. the forming of communes in a process that doesn’t stop until the problem of the alternative has been solved. It is this dynamic of generalization that is identified as one of ‘communization’ – communization as. Thus the ‘TAZ’. but this secession must also involve ‘war’. are to be rethought. call it what you wish’. but with a critique of alternativism in mind: we must secede.20 Since such supposedly liberated places cannot be stabilised as outside of ‘capitalism. are dispatched with a showmanly flourish in favor of a clutch of vapid abstractions. they are to be reconceived as part of the expansion and generalization of a broad insurrectionary struggle. or to stage a graceful retreat. and the real dynamic of the class relation.

the condition of its existence. in capital. Through an immediate act of assertion we can refuse such belonging here and now. In this period. Rather than the self-valorizations of an insurrectionist scene. ‘we’ have no ‘position’ apart from the capitalist class relation. An implicit premise of texts like Call and The Coming Insurrection is that. in any actual supersession of the capitalist class relation we ourselves must be overcome. no outside. at the deepest level.21 Taking the immanence of the self-reproduction of the class relation for a closed system without any conceivable terminus. and it is a rupture with the reproduction of what we are that will necessarily form the horizon of our struggles. What we are is. offer a much more sophisticated variant.The Moment of Communization mentally exempting this ‘we of a position’ from the dynamic of revolution. in this case the theory emerges as a reconceived autonomism informed by a smorgasbord of esoteric theory – Marxian and otherwise – but ultimately the formal presuppositions are the same. In texts such as Communism of Attack and Communism of Withdrawal Marcel. it is no longer. yet it is still stamped with the simple facticity of its class belonging day by day as it faces. the ‘we’ of revolution does not affirm itself. within this world. transcendent moment – the ‘withdrawal’ on the basis of which communists can launch an ‘attack’. It is no longer possible for the working class to identify itself positively. what can such ‘withdrawal’ ever mean other than the voluntaristic forming
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. it cannot assert itself against the ‘they’ of capital without being confronted by the problem of its own existence – an existence which it will be the nature of the revolution to overcome. constituted by this relation. does not identify itself positively. There is nothing to affirm in the capitalist class relation. But. It is significant perhaps that it is not only the milieu associated with Tiqqun and The Coming Insurrection that have developed theory which operates on this premise over the last decade. no autonomy. On the contrary. and the Batko group with which he is now associated. no secession. to embrace its class character as the essence of what it is. if our class belonging ever was a binding condition. Marcel posits the necessity of a purely external. because it cannot. position ourselves outside of the problem. no alternative.

as is its complement. living flesh weaving the flesh of the world’. in an attempt to rationalise its continued reproduction within capitalist society. the totality of real social relations could only ever involve the mechanical unfolding of some purely external process. which can do nothing other than reproduce itself. and the replacement of this by more interesting-sounding terms does not get us out of the problem. administered form which ‘they mean to stamp upon us’. This authentic selfhood – ‘singularity’. itself perpetuated through the logic of the reproduction of the class relation. The old abstraction of the egoistic subject goes through a strange mutation in the present phase in the form of the insurrectionist – a truly Stirnerite subject – for whom it is not only class belonging that can be cast off through a voluntarist assertion. Of course. The ‘self ’ here is an imposition of the ‘they’.Communization and its Discontents of a kind of ‘radical’ milieu which the state is quite happy to tolerate as long as it refrains from expressing. its disavowal of the ‘self ’ remains only a disavowal. singularities among similars. against this. ‘creature’. the kind of combativity which we find in The Coming Insurrection? To insist. and put in its place a conception of ‘creatures among creatures. on the complete immanence of the capitalist class relation – on our complete entwinement with capital – is not to resign ourselves to a monolithic. and the objectivity that oppresses it as merely something over there. it appears that way if one sets out from the assumption of the voluntaristically conceived subject: for such a subject. yet it remains a voluntarist subject which grasps itself as self-standing. ‘living flesh’ – need not be individualistically conceived. But this subject is a historically specific social form. a self which is truly its own. But while our class belonging
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. In taking the imposition of the ‘self ’ upon it to be something unidirectional and purely external.22 The ‘we’ is to reject this imposition. but the very imposition of the ‘self ’ per se.23 But the ‘we’ that rejects this imposition is still a voluntarist subject. a kind of neurotic. the ‘we’ posits another truer self beyond the first. Not insensitive to the problem of this subject. The Coming Insurrection sets out with a disavowal of the Fichtean I=I which it finds exemplified in Reebok’s ‘I am what I am’ slogan. closed totality.

bad world – on the basis of which people will join the authors in making the insurrection. Theory which substitutes for itself the simple description of what we must do fails
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. But this proclamation of immediacy disguises a theory which has already done the mediating. Tactical thought is then the guide and rule for this ‘we’. and all the forces arrayed against it. neither Call nor The Coming Insurrection present themselves straightforwardly as offering ‘a theory’.24 The ostensible point of these texts is to stage a simple cri de coeur – an immediate. Of course. we get a sundering of the totality into two basic abstractions. these texts conceive the revolution ultimately in terms of two opposed lines: the we that ‘gets organized’. Instead of a theoretical reckoning with the concrete totality that must be overcome in all its determinations. and a dualism results: the voluntarist ‘we’. and the impassive objectivity which is its necessary counterpart. that which is ‘held in common’ or ‘sets apart’. pre-theoretical stocktaking of reasons for rebelling against this bad. The prioritisation of a certain tactical conception is a major outcome and determinant of this position. but is rather that which ‘attaches to the sensible. a theory whose founding commitments are to the ‘we’ that must do something. It is only in the revolutionary undoing of this totality that these forms can be overcome. and a simple set of exhortations and practical prescriptions whose real theoretical function is to bring these abstractions into relation once more. and to its paternal they – commitments which forestall any grasp of the real situation.The Moment of Communization is unaffirmable – a mere condition of our being in our relation with capital – and while the abstract ‘self ’ may be part of the totality which is to be superseded – this does not mean that either is voluntarily renounceable. to worlds’. mediating its relations with an object which remains external. which has pre-constructed the ‘evident’. For all their claims to have overcome ‘classical politics’. which is ‘not primarily a matter of logic or reasoning’. or a reconstruction of the real horizon of the class relation. Theory is called upon to legitimate a practice which cannot be abandoned. Call in particular attempts to circumvent theoretical questions by appealing from the outset to ‘the evident’.

Communist theory does not present an alternative answer to the question of ‘what shall we do?’. the real negative presence which it bears. it runs ahead of thought. for the supersession of the capitalist class relation is not a mere theoretical construct. Rather. it is thought of the class relation. something that is only insofar as it is ceasing to be.Communization and its Discontents at its own task. with capital facing the problem of labor at every turn – even in its victories – the adequate thought of this relation is not of some equilibrium state. it is its very horizon as an antagonism. Since it is a relation which has no ideal ‘homeostatic’ state. in the light of the already-posited supersession of this totality. for the abolition of the capitalist class rela34
. Communist theory sets out not from the false position of some voluntarist subject. Communist theory is produced by – and necessarily thinks within – this antagonistic relation. It attempts to conceptually reconstruct the totality which is its ground. but from the posited supersession of the totality of forms which are implicated in the reproduction of this subject. an internally unstable. but it is only through this basic abstraction that theory takes as its content the determinate forms which are to be superseded. or some smoothly self-positing totality. but also what this overcoming must involve. or some kind of necessary postulate of reason. forms which stand out in their determinacy precisely because their dissolution has been posited. and it grasps itself as such. Communist theory thus has no need of an external. being posited incessantly by this relation itself. As merely posited. Archimedean point from which to take the measure of its object. this supersession is necessarily abstract. antagonistic relation. it is of a fundamentally impossible relation. and to draw out the supersession as it presents itself here. since in renouncing its real standpoint as theory it gives up the prospect of actually understanding not only what is to be overcome. but one which is always beyond itself. and communization has no need of a transcendent standpoint of ‘withdrawal’ or ‘secession’ from which to launch its ‘attack’. This positing is not only a matter of methodology.

even as it gesticulates wildly towards action. and they have to reflect. as the structures of the old workers’ movement lay behind it and the field of action became an indeterminate ‘globalization’ – the horizon of a triumphant liberal capitalism – class belonging appeared as something which had been already cast aside. But sometimes they find themselves in a moment where the fluidity of this movement has broken down.The Moment of Communization tion is not something on which one can decide. intentionally oriented to the world as it presents itself. this question necessarily sometimes faces the concrete individuals and groups who make up the classes of this relation. thinly-veiled self-affirmations. Individuals and groups move within the dynamics of the class relation and its struggles. In the moment in which Tiqqun was born. the tactical question is posed. even as it struggles to re-establish a practical link with this object. Tactical thought then obtrudes with its distinctive separations. and the ‘what we must do’ that it presents becomes reduced to a trivial list of survival skills straight out of Ray Mears. this individual or group is thrust into the contemplative standpoint of having a purely external relation to its object. and the continuation of involvement in overt struggles presents itself for the time being as an insurmountable problem. Lapsing back from the highs of a wave of struggles. to decide upon how best to continue. it would be absurd to claim that it was in itself somehow ‘wrong’ to pose such a question – the theory of communization as the direct abolition of the capitalist class relation could never invalidate such moments. Of course. then as this wave ebbs ever-further – and with it the context which prompted the initial question – theory indicates a completely contemplative standpoint. and capital too became correspondingly difficult to identify as the other pole of an
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. In Call and The Coming Insurrection this basic dilemma assumes a theoretical form. Its object becomes absolutely external and transcendent while its subject is reduced to fragile. a mere shed skin. the symptom of a momentary interruption in the immediate experience of the dynamic. When this emergent tactical thought turns out not to have resolved itself into the overcoming of the problem.

Tiqqun could never have anticipated the present crisis. fin-de-siècle capitalism. Here lies the historically-specific content represented by these texts: the indeterminacy of the object of antagonism. but these were of course not the struggles of an insurrectionary ‘communization’ waged voluntaristically in the desert.Communization and its Discontents inherently antagonistic relation. and it has not had any need of insurrectionary pep-talk to ‘get started’ in its response. and the struggles that have come with it.
The global working class is at present under a very overt attack as the functionaries of capital attempt to stabilise a world system constantly on the brink of disaster. or theoretical justifications for a retreat into ‘radical’ milieus. The ‘desert’ in which Tiqqun built its sandcastles was the arid. It is a cruel historical irony that the French state should find in this standpoint – defined precisely by its helplessness in the face of its object. the indifference to the problem of class and its overcoming. against some undefined they. Setting out in this desert. featureless horizon of a financialized. while it busies itself with the defiant. pushing its unhappy protagonists through a high-profile ‘terrorist’ scandal. unable to grasp it as a passing moment in the dynamic of the class relation. its fundamental reference to a moment that has passed – the threat of ‘terrorism’ and an ‘ultra-left’ worth crushing even further. And that. The ‘what shall we do?’ posed by the end of the wave of struggles which had the anti-globalization movement at its center is now passed. and far more threatening for capitalist society. melancholy outpourings of a stranded insurrectionism. tectonic movements are occurring within the global capitalist class relation far more significant. there is little need in the present moment to cast around for practical tips for the re-establishment of some insurrectionary practice. These struggles were a specific conjunctural response to the form that the
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. the voluntaristic relation to the totality constructed around this antagonism. The Tiqqunist jargon of authenticity accompanied the outbreak of student occupations in California.

communization of course did not present itself as a direct possibility. these struggles took the form of a transient generalization of occupations and actions for which there could be no clear notion of what it would mean to ‘win’. This was a situation which demanded resistance. and nor was any other ostensibly revolutionary dynamic immediately on the cards. temporary taking of spaces in these struggles that came to be identified with ‘communization’. that of the ‘radical’ wing of movements. While such language was. At the same time. ten years ago. voluntarist. It is as a result of this blocked movement that ‘communization’ has come to be barely differentiable from what people used to call ‘autonomy’. This arrival of ‘communization’ at the forefront of radical chic probably means little in itself. it was the very anachronism of the Tiqqunist problematic here that enabled it to resonate with a movement that took this form. Perversely.. ‘imaginary party’ etc) in the jargon of a basically continuous Anglo-American sensibility. and the higher education system in particular. and the lack of any revolutionary horizon whatsoever. – would have been more appropriate in characterizing such actions.The Moment of Communization current crisis had taken as it hit the Californian state. voluntarist selfaffirmation – in Tiqqun it merely finds itself reflected back at itself – and it should thus be no surprise that here. Yet. ‘autonomy’ etc. in California this flowering of autonomous spaces was the form of the movement itself. yet without there being any sense that reformist demands would be at all meaningful – hence the ‘no demands’ rhetoric of the first wave of these struggles. just one of the latest terms (alongside ‘human strike’. Caught between the necessity of action. but one that was so only as a blocked – yet at the same time necessary – response to the crisis. This sensibility always involved a proclivity for abstract. the language of yesteryear – ‘TAZ’. but the major
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. ‘communization’ is appropriately abstract. the impossibility of reformism. given the absence of any immediate possibility of actual communization here. If Tiqqun’s ‘communization’ is an insurrectionary reinvention of ‘TAZ’. in California it met a movement finally adequate to such ideas. formulated at the limit of the historical moment which produced these ideas. ‘autonomy’ etc. It was the demandless. and self-affirming.

Communization and its Discontents movement so far to find its voice in this language is more interesting. but a symptom of the developing crisis in the class relation. What is coming is not a Tiqqunist insurrection. for the impasse of this movement is not merely a particular lack of programme or demands. while capital runs into crisis at every turn and the working class is forced to wage a struggle for which there is no plausible victory. even if Glenn Beck thinks he spies one in the Arab uprisings. this is an era in which the end of this relation looms perceptibly on the horizon.
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. If communization is presenting itself currently. it is in the palpable sense of an impasse in the dynamic of the class relation.

2
.

.

Communization and communism are things of the future. as communization. Within itself. the abolition of the state. of all forms of property. The revolution is communization. imposed by the very necessities of struggle against the capitalist class.
. This is the content of the revolution to come that these struggles signal – in this cycle of struggles – each time that the very fact of acting as a class appears as an external constraint. Hence the struggle of the proletariat as a class signals and produces the revolution as its own supersession. of exchange. to struggle as a class has become the problem – it has become its own limit. the abolition of classes – are ‘measures’ that abolish capital. a limit to overcome. but as its very content. of the division of labor. it does not have communism as a project and result. but it is in the present that we must speak about them. the extension of the situation where everything is freely available as the unification of human activity – in a word.Communization in the Present Tense Théorie Communiste
In the course of revolutionary struggle.

in the delimitation of accumulation within a national area. in the dichotomy between employment and unemployment. the forms of appropriation by capital of this labor-power in the immediate production process.e. in the institutional representations that all this implied. in the link between wages. and in the process of reproduction. within this very self-presupposition. but the contradiction between proletariat and capital was located at this level through the production and confirmation. work and training. whatever the social and political forms of its existence (from the Communist Parties to autonomy. Until the crisis of the late 1960s. the creation and development of labor-power employed by capital in an ever more collective and social way. restructuring. growth and productivity within a national area. in the submission of the labor process to the collectivity of workers. there was indeed the self-presupposition of capital. of a working class identity through which the cycle of struggles was structured as the competition between two hegemonies.
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. This is the conflictual situation which developed in this cycle of struggles as workers’ identity – an identity which found its distinguishing features and its immediate modalities of recognition in the ‘large factory’. the workers’ defeat and the restructuring that followed. cycle of struggle: on the struggle of the proletariat as a class as its own limit The principal result of the capitalist production process has always been the renewal of the capitalist relation between labor and its conditions: in other words it is a process of self-presupposition. on the one hand.Communization and its Discontents a) Crisis. and on the other. from the Socialist State to the workers’ councils). This workers’ identity. This identity was the very substance of the workers’ movement. according to the latter’s concept. as much in the factory as at the level of the state – i. rested entirely on the contradiction which developed in this phase of real subsumption of labor under capital between. two rival modes of managing and controlling reproduction.

on the one hand. any surplus-value must be able to find the possibility of operating as additional capital anywhere. the content of the restructuring was the destruction of all that which had become an impediment to the fluidity of the self-presupposition of capital. East and West. i. of all the separations. of exchange (whatever its form).e. Financial capital was the architect of this restructuring.
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. or into center and periphery) predetermining this transformation. in the late 1960s and the 1970s. which means that the proletariat finds and confronts its own constitution and existence as a class in its contradiction with capital. of its reproduction and expansion. Any surplus product must be able to find its market anywhere. without any formalisation of the international cycle (such as the division into blocs. of this entire cycle of struggles founded on workers’ identity. insofar as they prevented the working class as a whole. the production of surplus-value and the reproduction of the conditions of this production coincided. Because the perspective of revolution is no longer a matter of the affirmation of the class. of factories. On the other hand. To abolish capital is at the same time to negate oneself as a worker and not to self-organize as such: it’s a movement of the abolition of enterprises. from having to face as such the whole of capital. which impeded the transformation of the surplus product into surplus-value and additional capital. of being transformed into means of production and labor power. These impediments consisted. From this flows the disappearance of a worker’s identity confirmed in the reproduction of capital – i. of the product. protections and specifications that were erected in opposition to the decline in value of labor-power. The current cycle of struggles is fundamentally defined by the fact that the contradiction between classes occurs at the level of their respective reproduction.e. the end of the workers’ movement and the concomitant bankruptcy of self-organization and autonomy as a revolutionary perspective. it can no longer be a matter of selforganization. With the restructuring that was completed in the 1980s. turnover. and accumulation. there were all the constraints of circulation. in the continuity of its existence.The Moment of Communization The restructuring was the defeat.

and
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. to act as a class is currently. in the presence of young workers whose education has broken the continuity of generations succeeding each other and who overwhelmingly reject factory work and the working class condition in general. nor in terms of their own inscription in the national context. to act as a class is the limit of its action as a class – this is now an objective situation of class struggle – and that the limit is constructed as such in the struggles and becomes class belonging as an external constraint. in the generalization of lean production. – this type of employment now accounts for the majority of workers). and gives rise to internal conflicts within the struggles themselves. and on the other. for the same reason. often temporary. this rift in the action of the proletariat. on the one hand. It consists. to have no other horizon than capital and the categories of its reproduction. It was a social system of existence and reproduction that defined working-class identity and was expressed in the workers’ movement. in working in smaller companies or sites.Communization and its Discontents For the proletariat. but it is in every case the particular practice of a struggle at a given moment and in given conditions. This conflict. Large concentrations of workers in India and China form part of a global segmentation of the labor force. without career prospects). truck drivers. shippers. and in offshoring. in the tertiarization of employment (maintenance specialists. it is to be in contradiction with and to put into question its own reproduction as a class. stevedores. This cycle of struggles is the action of a recomposed working class. for the proletariat. in a new division of labor and of the working class with the outsourcing of low value-added processes (involving young workers. in the disappearance of the great workers’ bastions and the proletarianization of employees. etc. is the content of class struggle and what is at stake in it. They can neither be regarded as a renaissance elsewhere of what has disappeared in ‘the West’ in terms of their global definition. in the core areas of accumulation. This determines the level of conflict with capital. What is now at stake in these struggles is that. equipment operators. This transformation is a determination of the current contradiction between classes.

in the very course of the proletariat’s activity as a class. which is denied in capital: revolutionary practice is precisely the coincidence between the change in circumstances and that in human activity or self-transformation. being a class is the obstacle that its struggle as a class must get beyond. is to say that it is the class of surplus-value
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. on the basis of current struggles. to enter into conflict with its previous situation. for itself. that it produces its entire being. Proletarians do not liberate their ‘true individuality’. To produce class belonging as an external constraint is. it is possible to understand the tipping point of the class struggle – its supersession – as a produced supersession. This abolition is not a goal that is set. This is the reason why we can currently speak of communism. as an external constraint which is objectified in capital. this is not ‘liberation’. its organization. its reality and its constitution as a class in capital and against it. within these struggles.25 From daily struggles to revolution. Currently.The Moment of Communization not the mere existence of quantitative material characteristics. the revolution is predicated on the supersession of a contradiction which is constitutive of the class struggle: for the proletariat. The proletariat does not thereby become a ‘purely negative’ being. and speak of it in the present as a real.e. It is now a fact that revolution is the abolition of all classes. there can only be a rupture. it treats its own existence. In its struggle against capital. but a current content in what the class struggle is itself. a limit. a definition of revolution as a norm to be achieved. everything that defines it in its relation to capital (and it is nothing but this relation). as the limit of its action. insofar as action as a class of the proletariat is. But this rupture is signalled in the daily course of the class struggle each time that class belonging appears. With the production of class belonging as an external constraint. This is the ‘hardest step to take’ in the theoretical understanding and practice of contemporary struggles. existing movement. for the proletariat. nor is it ‘autonomy’. i. To say that the proletariat only exists as a class in and against capital. the class turns back against itself.

in practice. it is signalled in the multiplication of rifts within the class struggle. a qualitative leap. this ‘recognition’ will in fact consist in a practical cognition. as a prelude to its revolutionary activity. neither is it the simple realisation on the part of the proletariat that there is nothing else to do than revolution in the face of the failure of everything else. not of itself for itself. This rupture is produced positively by the unfolding of the cycle of struggles which precedes it. What has disappeared in the current cycle of struggles. in this rift in the proletariat’s activity as a class. We exist in this rupture. we are actors in them when we are directly involved. The unity of the class can no longer constitute itself on the basis of the wage and demands-based struggle. it is not an alternative.
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.Communization and its Discontents producing labor. and it has to do so all the more in the situation in which its existence as a class is that which it has to confront in the reproduction of capital. The proletariat can only be revolutionary by recognising itself as a class. ‘Revolution is the only solution’ is just as inept as talk of the revolutionary dynamic of demands-based struggles. its de-objectification. but is rather the confirmation of a proletarian identity in the reproduction of capital. in conflict. following the restructuring of the 1970s and 1980s. We must not be mistaken as to the content of this ‘recognition’. it recognizes itself as such in every conflict. For the proletariat to recognize itself as a class will not be its ‘return to itself ’ but rather a total extroversion (a self-externalisation) as it recognizes itself as a category of the capitalist mode of production. is not this objective existence of the class.e. For the proletariat. But this rupture is not a miracle. there can only be a rupture. What we are as a class is immediately nothing other than our relation to capital. but of capital – i. these rifts within the class struggle of the proletariat through which it calls itself into question. and we promote. From struggles over immediate demands to revolution. The unity of the proletariat can only be the activity in which it abolishes itself in abolishing everything that divides it. As theorists we are on the look-out for.

It is a particular moment of struggles which themselves are already theoretical (in the sense that they are productive of theory). There is an absolute identity between being in contradiction with capital and being in contradiction with its own situation and definition as a class. that the proletariat is nothing if it is separated from capital and that it bears no
47
. In current strikes over layoffs. Against capital. rather than its intellectual veracity. It is its practical existence. is not an abstract formalization which will then prove that it conforms to reality through examples. in which the proletariat has no other horizon than capital. that it proves in the concrete. workers often no longer demand to keep their jobs. these are not earthshaking declarations or ‘radical’ actions but rather all the practices of the proletariat of flight from. Currently the class struggle of the proletariat has identifiable elements or activities which signal its own supersession in its own course. insofar as they have a critical relation vis-à-vis themselves. labor has no future. It is through this rift within action as a class itself that communization becomes a question in the present. but increasingly they fight for substantial redundancy payments instead. as it has been presented above. b) Struggles producing theory 26 The theory of this cycle of struggle. or rejection of.The Moment of Communization There is no longer any perspective for the proletariat on its own basis as class of the capitalist mode of production. It was already strikingly evident in the so-called ‘suicidal’ struggles of the Cellatex firm in France. its own condition. This rift within the class struggle. Most often. is the dynamic of this cycle of struggles. other than the capacity to supersede its class existence in the abolition of capital. and thus simultaneously enters into contradiction with its own action as a class. threats which were not carried out but which were widely imitated in other conflicts over the closure of firms. where workers threatened to discharge acid into a river and to blow up the factory.

In the struggles of the unemployed and the precarious. mobility. In the French movement of 1998. as in the struggles of the unemployed and the precarious in the winter of 1998 in France. the unemployment of the class claims for itself the status of being the starting-point for such a definition. Bangladesh.e. The same thing occurs when workers who have been sacked don’t demand jobs but severance pay instead. thus inscribing themselves in the dynamic of this cycle of struggles. and as demand for this deessentialization. in Savar. other than the abolition of that by which it exists. in 2006. This contradiction. from its own nature. inherent in capitalist accumulation. outsourcing. which makes the existence of the proletariat as a class the limit of its class action. which is a contradiction in capital-in-process. In the same period.Communization and its Discontents future within itself. It is the de-essentialization of labor which becomes the very activity of the proletariat: both tragically. The need for capital to measure everything in labor time and to posit the exploitation of labor as a matter of life or death for it is simultaneously the de-essentialization of living labor relative to the social forces that capital concentrates in itself. two factories were torched and a hun48
. and more generally in the struggles of the unemployed in this cycle of struggles. 50km north of Dhaka. the Moulinex employees who had been made redundant set fire to a factory building. in its struggles without immediate perspectives (i. the struggle of the proletariat against capital makes this contradiction its own. flexibility. The segmentation of the labor force. its suicidal struggles). internships and informal work have blurred all the separations. Similarly. takes the very particular form of the definition of the class vis-à-vis capital. it was the definition of the unemployed which was upheld as the point of departure for the reformulation of waged employment. training. Unemployment is no longer clearly separated from employment. parttime employment. and champions it.

and which was seen as such in the practical modalities of these self-organized movements. they made everything that produces and defines them their target. there’s no prospect of the formation of a vast workers’ movement from the proliferation of various types of demands-based action affecting all aspects of life and the reproduction of the working class. The proletariat cannot find within itself the capacity to create other inter-individual relations. against self-organization).e. became that which had to be overcome. without overturning and negating what it is itself in this society. without entering into contradiction with autonomy and its dynamic. in the struggle.e. In Algeria. Rioters revealed and attacked the proletarian situation now: the worldwide precarization of the labor force. and it was the entirety of the living conditions and reproduction of the proletariat which came into play beyond the demands made by the immediate protagonists of the strike. they attacked their own condition. i.. In Argentina it was the determinations of the proletariat as a class of this society (i. people self-organized as the unemployed of Mosconi. It is thus that the revolution as communization becomes credible. the division of labor. minor wage demands turned into riots. In the case of Argentina. the relation between men and women . i.. In doing so they immediately made obsolete.e. In France in November 2005. These demands-based actions often turn paradoxically on the destruction of the conditions of labor. i. in the actual modalities of their realisation. but all the following acts are directed against it (i. exchange. which. the rioters didn’t demand anything.e. any desire to
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. as the workers of Brukman. as slum-residents… but in self-organizing they immediately came up against what they were as an obstacle. Self-organization is perhaps the first act of revolution. of their own raison d’être. in the banlieues. In China and India.e. in the very moment in which such a demand could have been articulated.) which were effectively undermined by the way productive activities were undertaken.The Moment of Communization dred others ransacked after workers had not been paid for three months. property. forms of representation were dismissed without new ones being formed.

and what constituted its force. To achieve the demand through its expansion would in effect be to sabotage it. but they could only reach this point by confronting this glass floor of production as their limit. as a demandsbased movement.Communization and its Discontents be an ‘ordinary proletarian’. on the other hand. taken in themselves. In the Greek riots. But if these riots were a movement of the class. within the movement. the satisfaction of which would have been unacceptable to itself as a movement of demands. these are all proletarians who every day live the reproduction of capital50
. was on the one hand what constituted the movement. What credibility was there in a link-up with the November rioters on the basis of a stable job for all? On the one hand. The struggle against the CPE was a movement of demands. And the ways in which this movement produced this external constraint (the aims. precarious workers. Students without a future. they didn’t constitute a struggle in what is the very matrix of classes: production. the proletariat didn’t demand anything. and didn’t consider itself to be opposed to capital as the foundation of any alternative. but in doing so it would either negate its own specificity. Attacking institutions and the forms of social reproduction. young immigrants. but this was also the expression of its limits. the unfolding of the riots. the very necessity of this link-up induced an internal lovehate dynamic. It is in this way that these riots were able to make the key achievement of producing and targeting class belonging as a constraint. in spring 2006. or it would inevitably be forced to collide more or less violently with all those who had shown in the riots of November 2005 that the demand to be an ‘ordinary proletarian’ was obsolete. Three months later. this link-up was objectively inscribed in the genetic code of the movement. just as objective. still in France. the composition of the rioters…) was intrinsically defined by this limit: the relation of exploitation as coercion pure and simple. the student movement against the CPE could only comprehend itself by becoming the general movement of the precarious.

the production of class belonging as an external constraint was more a
51
. in the looting. the LKP. but only in this way. In Guadeloupe. on the other. At the same time as they struggle in this moment of coercion which they experience as separated. coercion is included in this reproduction because they are proletarians. and in the attacks on public buildings. means that wage-demands are a contradiction in terms. It is in this way that it locates itself at the level of this cycle of struggles and is one of its determining historical moments. on the one hand. which was centered on permanent workers (essentially in public services) but which attempted to hold the terms of this contradiction together through the multiplication and the infinite diversity of demands. From this point of view. The demand was destabilized in the very course of the struggle. it was contested. but the specific forms of exploitation of the entire population. This contradiction structured the course of events between. but they experience it every day as separated and aleatory (accidental and non-necessary) in relation to production itself. were able to prevent this contradiction from breaking out more violently at the heart of the movement (it is important to note that the only death was that of a trade-unionist killed on a barricade). the importance of unemployment. inherited from its colonial history. they only conceive of and live this separation as a lack in their own struggle against this mode of production. and. but only by autonomizing the moments and the instances of social reproduction in their attacks and their aims. Reproduction and production of capital remained foreign to each other.The Moment of Communization ist social relations as coercion. and of the part of the population that lives from benefits and or from an underground economy. the absurdity of central wage-demands for the majority of people on the barricades. proletarians called themselves into question as proletarians. It is in this way that this movement produced class belonging as an exterior constraint. In their own practice and in their struggle. as was its form of organization.

In general. The ‘distribution of wealth’. In this respect it inaugurates a specific crisis of the wage relation of restructured capitalism. has become taboo. a decoupling between consumption and the wage as income. on the other. the subprime crisis is the first to have taken as its point of departure not the financial assets that refer to capital investments. both in the core countries and in the emerging ones. and as
52
. it is paradoxically in the proletariat’s definition to the very depth of its being as a class of this mode of production. than something at stake in the struggle. It is an internal dynamic which comes about as a result of the whole relation between proletariat and capital in the capitalist mode of production such as it emerged from the restructuring and such as it is now entering into crisis. the reproduction of labor power was subjected to a double decoupling. as was confirmed in the recent movement of strikes and blockades (October-November 2010) following the reform of the pensions system in France. remains definitive. more a sort of schizophrenia. In restructured capitalism (the beginnings of the crisis of which we are currently experiencing). The wage demand has changed its meaning. On the one hand a decoupling between the valorization of capital and the reproduction of labor power and. from being essentially conflictual in the capitalist mode of production. In the succession of financial crises which for the last twenty years or so have regulated the current mode of valorization of capital. and more precisely that of the poorest households. Of course. but household consumption. But now. the wage demand is currently characterized by a dynamic that wasn’t previously possible. with the outbreak of the current crisis.Communization and its Discontents sociological state. in which the continual decrease in the share of wages in the wealth produced. the division of the working day into necessary and surplus labor has always been definitive of the class struggle. in the struggle over this division.

that it finds here the content of its revolutionary action as communist measures: the abolition of property. that it is apparent in practice. of the division of labor. within the historical mode of capital accumulation with the detonation of the subprime crisis. In the most trivial course of the wage demand. Class belonging as external constraint is thus in itself a content. exchange. This is currently the central character of the wage demand in class struggle. It broke out on the very basis of the wage relation which gave rise to the financialization of the capitalist economy: wage cuts as a requirement for ‘value creation’ and global competition within the labor force. that is to say a practice. It was this functional necessity that returned. division of labor. of exchange and of value. It is the paucity of surplus-value relative to accumulated capital which is at the heart of the crisis of exploitation: if.The Moment of Communization nothing else. c) Two or three things we know about it It is because the proletariat is not-capital. Communization is nothing other than communist measures taken as simple measures of struggle by the proletariat against capital. but in a negative fashion. It is now the wage relation that is at the core of the current crisis. the proletariat sees its own existence as a class objectify itself as something which is alien to it to the extent that the capitalist relation itself places it in its heart as something alien. at the heart of the contradiction between the proletariat and capital there was not the question
53
. The current crisis broke out because proletarians could no longer repay their loans.27 The current crisis is the beginning of the phase of reversal of the determinations and dynamic of capitalism as it had emerged from the restructuring of the 1970s and 1980s. which supersedes itself in communizing measures when the limit of the struggle as a class is manifested. property). that its existence as a class is the limit of its own struggle as a class. and in a conflictual way. because it is the dissolution of all existing conditions (labor.

i. It is not through an attack on the side of the nature of labor as productive of surplus-value that the demands-based struggle is superseded (which would always devolve back to a problem of distribution).e. But to speak of ‘products’ and to pose the question of their circulation. their absorption in individual. In communism. the revolution would remain a pious wish.28 The abolition of value is a concrete transformation of the landscape in which we live.e. whose dynamic it constitutes. in the material configuration of buildings. namely the capitalist mode of production. it is the abolition of the division of labor such as it is inscribed in urban zoning. Relations between individuals are fixed in things. Hatred of capital and the desire for another life are only the necessary ideological expressions of this contradiction for-itself which is exploitation. intersubjective relations. it is a new geography. in the very existence of something which is called a factory or a point of production. but through an attack on the side of the means of production as capital. i. The abolition of social relations is a very material affair. there are objects which are used to produce. others which are directly consumed. appropriation no longer has any currency. because exchange value is by nature material. if the contradiction between the proletariat and capital wasn’t a contradiction for the very thing.e. because it is the very notion of the ‘product’ which is abolished. if it was not a ‘game which produces the abolition of its own rule’. in the separation between town and country. their abolition as the factories in which it is defined what it is to be a product. it is the extension of the situation where everything is freely available. their distribution or their ‘transfer’. to
54
.e. i. i. and others still which are used for both. it is their definition. the destruction (perhaps physical) of certain means of production. the matrices of exchange and commerce. Of course. if there was only a problem of distribution.Communization and its Discontents of labor which is productive of surplus-value. The attack against the capitalist nature of the means of production is their abolition as value absorbing labor in order to valorize itself.

It has concrete or abstract results. It is not from the ‘product’ that we must proceed. There is no measure which. and the ‘general intellect’ or the ‘collective worker’ as the dominant force of production. taken separately. is to presuppose points of rupture. The social character of production does not prefigure anything: it merely renders the basis of value contradictory. it means the obligation for the whole class to organize itself to seek food in the sectors to be communized. for that would raise the question of their appropriation or of their transfer under some given mode. thereby abolishing themselves as workers. A revolution cannot be carried out without taking communist
55
. etc. or be crushed. the depot where goods are freely available in certain visions of communism. underlies them.The Moment of Communization conceive a moment of appropriation. in itself. but these results are never ‘products’. is ‘communism’. The ‘product’ is not a simple thing. nor ‘distribution’ of the shit that we inherit from class society. In communism. but from activity. it is because the capitalist mode of production already allows us to see – albeit contradictorily and not as a ‘good side’ – human activity as a continuous global social flux. The destruction of exchange means the workers attacking the banks which hold their accounts and those of other workers. human activity is infinite because it is indivisible. it means the workers communicating their ‘products’ to themselves and the community directly and without a market. of ‘coagulation’ of human activity: the market in market societies. renders them the moments of a process which can only communize ever further. nor ‘collectivization’ of surplus-value sucking machines: it is the nature of the movement which connects these actions. What is communist is not ‘violence’ in itself. thus making it necessary to do without. To speak of the ‘product’ is to suppose that a result of human activity appears as finite vis-à-vis another such result or the sphere of other such results. If we can speak of infinite human activity in communism.

The confrontation with the state immediately poses the problem of arms. the unemployed. clothing. The dictatorship of the social movement of communization is the process of the integration of human56
. It permits the abolition to an ever greater extent of all competition and division between proletarians. there is no turning back. This is why all the measures of communization will have to be a vigorous action for the dismantling of the connections which link our enemies and their material support: these will have to be rapidly destroyed. seizing all the weapons (the destructive ones. and enables the integration of more and more non-proletarians to the communizing class which is simultaneously in the process of constituting and dissolving itself. we will run up against the opposition of armed groups. integrate and reproduce within its social relations. and enter into contact with other sectors. of telecommunications. and mutually interpenetrating: the constitution of a front or of determinate zones of combat is the death of the revolution. From the moment in which we begin to consume freely.). rootless drop-out students. etc. communizing supplies. food. Military and social activities are inseparable. simultaneous. without the possibility of return. it is necessary to reproduce that which is consumed. making this the content and the unfolding of its armed confrontation with those whom the capitalist class can still mobilize. ruined farmers. Communization is not the peaceful organization of the situation where everything is freely available and of a pleasant way of life amongst proletarians. housing.Communization and its Discontents measures: dissolving wage labor. so doing. The deepening and extension of this social process gives flesh and blood to new relations. integrating the destitute (including those of us who will have reduced ourselves to this state). but also telecommunications. which can only be solved by setting up a distribution network to support combat in an almost infinite multiplicity of places. it is thus necessary to seize the means of transport. From the moment in which proletarians dismantle the laws of commodity relations.

i. it is a question of dissolving the middle strata by taking concrete communist measures which compel them to begin to join the proletariat. and will find its Noske and Scheidemann amongst the self-organized. merely because they ‘are’ waged and exploited.e. In fact. The social movement in Argentina was confronted by. The revolution. is to carry out measures of communization which remove the very basis of this division. and the excluded and middle strata. the unemployed. supersedes the dilemma between the Leninist or democratic class alliances and Gorter’s ‘proletariat alone’: two different types of defeat. tried only very marginally. Proletarians ‘are’ not revolutionaries like the sky ‘is’ blue. when confronted by this question. as already shown by the German revolution. In the absence of this. which has as its point of departure what they are. and posed. The movement in which the proletariat is defined in practice as the movement of the constitution of the human community is the reality of the abolition of classes. which in this cycle of struggles can no longer be anything but communization. This is something which the occupied factories in Argentina. The strict delimitation of the proletariat in comparison with other classes and its struggle against all commodity production are at the same time a process which constrains the strata of the salaried petite-bourgeoisie. the question of the relations between proletarians in employment. to join the communizing class. It only provided extremely fragmentary responses.The Moment of Communization ity into the proletariat which is in the process of disappearing. Zanon) with some charitable redistribution to groups of piqueteros. to achieve their
57
. or even because they are the dissolution of existing conditions. they constitute themselves as a revolutionary class. the class of social (middle-) management. between the skilled and the unskilled. In their self-transformation. of which the most interesting is without doubt that of its territorial organization. being generally satisfied (cf. capital will play on this fragmentation throughout the movement. The only way of overcoming the conflicts between the unemployed and those with jobs. right from the start and in the course of the armed struggle.

its formal proximity to the proletariat pushes it to present. its role of management and direction of capitalist cooperation is essential but ever rendered precarious. but rather they are its production. and for these very same reasons. To conclude. This is not a period of transition. (translation: Endnotes. communist measures must be distinguished from communism: they are not embryos of communism.)
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. capital is not abolished for communism but through communism. how we dissolve the block of fear through the revolution. On the other hand. its social position depends upon the very fragile mechanism of the subtraction of fractions of surplus value. On the one hand a massive majority of the middle strata is salaried and thus no longer has a material base to its social position. how we do away with the exchange-based relations of our adversary to impose on him the logic of the communization of relations and of the seizure of goods. in developed countries. it is the revolution: communization is only the communist production of communism. nor communism as immediatism. national or democratic alternative managerial ‘solutions’ which would preserve its own positions.Communization and its Discontents ‘proletarianization’. the question is at the same time simpler and more dangerous. The essential question which we will have to solve is to understand how we extend communism. however. The struggle against capital is what differentiates communist measures from communism. Nowadays. in these struggles. Indeed. more precisely through its production. how we integrate agriculture so as not to have to exchange with farmers. The revolutionary activity of the proletariat always has as its content the mediation of the abolition of capital through its relation to capital: this is neither one branch of an alternative in competition with another. before it is suffocated in the pincers of the commodity.

3
.

.

Must we therefore conclude.30 Its weakness comes from the continually resurgent temptation to think that the desire to establish different relations suffices to start producing them. it is to affirm. Its purpose is not to convince or denounce. is not a text of analysis or debate. either we hear it or we pay it no heed’?31
. The merit of Call lies in taking note of this.
Primo
Call. that ‘a call cannot be refuted. and of trying to design strategies which live up to this realization. and on this basis to announce a strategy for revolution. with Gilles Dauvé. to expose.Reflections on the Call 2 Leon de Mattis
The need for communism traverses the entirety of the society of capital. as its name indicates.

Communization and its Discontents Call itself. But contrary to Meeting. In Call the term communization is systematically understood as ‘making common’. whose problematic is to interrogate the concept of communization. a decisive moment in this process’ (p.. on the basis of its very problematic. is capable of falling.21) encourages this reaction from the first lines of the first scholium: ‘This is a call. The question is not to demonstrate.66). As Call illustrates quite well a certain proclivity into which the whole ‘area which poses the question of communization’.’ (p. That is to say it aims at those who can hear it.. at the same time. in one form or another. to be exhaustive. to put in writing these critiques is an occasion to nourish the debate. We will go straight to the evident. to argue. in its refusal to discuss the ‘sensibly [self-]evident’ (p.32 It is to be understood that the objective of these reflections is not to make a textual commentary on Call. Call gives communization a determinate content. what we term communization.4) But. that is. Insurrection itself is just an accelerator. In the previous quotation for instance the ‘acts of com62
. Call is the typical product of a debate inherent to the very existence of the ‘area which poses the question of communization’: and pursuing this debate to its conclusion is a preliminary to any emergence of a self-conscious ‘communizing movement’ within this area. or to interpret the thought or intentions of the authors in an academic manner. Call explicitly situates itself in this perspective: ‘As we apprehend it. to convince. Call is far from posing an unanimity in the struggles which. the process of instituting communism can only take the form of a collection of acts of communization ..
Secundo
That which characterizes the communizing current is not so much a common interpretation of communism as an attention paid to the process of its production.. pose the question of communization: it was on the contrary the occasion for numerous discussions. Even if it is one of its expressions.

and complexified relations. as when it is said that to communize a space is to liberate its use.’ (p.’ (p. such-and-such knowledge’. But we note this: not only is that which we have to share obviously incompatible with the prevailing order. the integration of workers’ organizations into the state management apparatus – the foundation of social democracy – was paid for with the renunciation of all ability to be a nuisance. For example: In Europe. This sense is even more visible in other parts of the text. The Maisons du Peuple were the last shelters for this indistinction between the need for immediate communization and the strategic requirements of a practical implementation of the revolutionary process. suchand-such machine. (p. intensified.The Moment of Communization munization’ are described as ‘making common such-and-such space. The theme of sharing is omnipresent in Call.68) In the same logic. then communism is systematically assimilated with ‘sharing’. if communization is ‘making common’. One finds is particularly developed in the scholium to Proposition V in the following terms: That in us which is most singular calls to be shared. and on the basis of this liberation experimenting with refined.50) Sharing is the basis of collective action as envisaged by Call: ‘We say that squatting will only make sense again for us provided that we clarify the basis of the sharing we enter into.52)
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. but this order strives to track down any form of sharing of which it does not lay down the rules. of an urgent need for communism. (p. Here too the emergence of the labor movement was a matter of material solidarities. That which is put in common is use.54) Even if communization is conceived as the communization of relations it is first of all on the basis of a common usage: ‘Communizing a place means: setting its use free.

. that sharing is also constitutive of the capitalist order in affirming that ‘the dominant order . would not survive without this form of social sharing.66) Thus communist sharing is not given. to do away with the police. We also find further along: ‘It belongs to the communist way that we explain to ourselves and formulate the basis of our sharing. but we have trouble understanding how they can be synonymous. even economically.’ But then are we to understand that any sharing not controlled by the ‘dominant order’ is a communist sharing? We can imagine so given that communism is purely and simply assimilated to sharing minus control: ‘the question of communism is.’ (p. Needs are not what capitalist rule has accustomed us to. But how? Here the text eats its tail. on one hand. And first. To need is never about needing things without
64
.. Call recognizes.Communization and its Discontents
Tertio
The point is not that ‘sharing’ and communism have nothing to do with another.64) It is true that the point is still to ‘elaborate modes of sharing’. and on the other. strives to track down any form of sharing of which it does not lay down the rules. in substance: the one that leads to communism. between those who live together. Nothing more is said on what can differentiate it from the sharing admitted in the world of capital other than the fact that this particular sharing must lead to a redefinition of relations: So communism starts from the experience of sharing. uses. and even in the countries where capitalism is the oldest and where the familial relation reduces itself to its simplest expression (the parent/child relation). Sharing already exists in capitalism: social institutions as important as the family function on the basis of sharing. A certain mode of sharing leads to communism. capital. OK. to elaborate modes of sharing.. in a negative sense.. but which? Response. from the sharing of our needs.’ (p. it is to be elaborated.

something which at one time incarnated the communist aspiration but no longer. Call. have been adjusted for that purpose only. that is. to beings. tries to make sure that there is. it serves only to qualify the old ‘movement’. the language and the affects.The Moment of Communization at the same time needing worlds.68) However. and the worldwide tempo that sets the pace of it all. even worse..’ (p. empire. (pp. no situation. or existed once but is now as surpassed as the usage of steam on the railway. (p. but indeed in the abolition of those relations. it is never a question of the ‘abolition of class relations’ – nonetheless a classical corollary of the ‘abolition of relations of production’. but far from being seen as the system which englobes the totality of social reality. civilization..’ (p. It simply doesn’t speak of it. doesn’t affirm that the division of society into antagonistic social classes doesn’t exist. Certainly Call affirms that ‘Communism does not consist in the elaboration of new relations of production. call it what you wish – that not only intends to control each situation but. or call it ‘civilization’: There is a general context – capitalism. to the point where we could as well call it ‘empire’ as call it ‘capitalism’. The term ‘class struggle’ and ‘proletariat’ are never employed.64-5) From then on the definitions of communism multiply: ‘By communism we mean a certain discipline of the attention.9) It is precisely because capitalism is considered as an assemblage
65
.’ (p.65) Or again: ‘The communist question is about the elaboration of our relationship to the world. it is described essentially through its mechanisms of control.63) Among all these definitions there is one which shines out by its absence: communism as the suppression of class society. to ourselves. The streets and the houses. as often as possible. Capitalism is certainly present in the text. As for the adjective ‘worker’.

casting from ourselves all forms of valorization.Communization and its Discontents and not as a system that Call supposes that there exists a possible ‘beyond’ to the world of capital. But ‘relations of production’ are no more relations between forms of life or worlds than they are relations between persons. It is a generalized social relation which cannot be abolished locally because even where people would not ‘live’ relations of production between themselves. they would no less be incorporated in relations of production which structure capitalist society as a whole. or a thousand. but indeed in the abolition of those relations. One might object that Call would also not see relations of production as inter-individual relations. The entities which are
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. A ‘relation of production’ is not a relation between individuals.68).68) The text which follows contains a surprising affirmation: these ‘relations of production’ can be abolished immediately ‘between ourselves’: Not having relations of production with our world or between ourselves means never letting the search for results become more important than the attention to the process. ‘forms of life’ and other ‘relations to the world’ do indeed traverse bodies. And in the text of Call. making sure we do not disconnect affection and cooperation (p. simply because its philosophy banishes the concept of the individual. or at least it cannot be only that: two people do not maintain between themselves a private relation of production which they could somehow negate by their sole common volition. The problem is that a ‘relation of production’ is not a particular relation between two people. or even a hundred.’ (p.
Quarto
Let us return for a moment to the quotation from the scholium of Proposition VI: ‘communism does not consist in the elaboration of new relations of production.

The proletarian would doff his cap in passing to the capitalist with his top hat and cigar. on the other hand. between. or indeed what Call designates as ‘existential liberalism’. They model and restrain them without exhausting them. We could also say that ‘the relations of production contain the relations that we can maintain among ourselves’. and ‘existential liberalism’ is not the unique translation of the effect of relations of production in everyday life. and. But unfortunately thing are a little more complicated. on the one hand. We have both a certain margin of maneuver (it’s on this that Call counts) and an equally certain limit (it’s this which Call doesn’t see). ‘Marxism’ would say that ‘the relations of production determine the relations that we can maintain among ourselves’: but ‘determine’ implies a necessity of the very form of the link just where we can observe an extreme diversity. and there would be nothing more to say.’ (p.
67
. Call is not mistaken when it says: ‘capitalism has revealed itself to be not merely a mode of production. and not the contrary. not an identity. the ‘relations of production’. to relations of production.67) But this ‘reduction in the last instance’ is not a collapsing. Relations of production are relations between classes. It is certain that the division of society into classes would be infinitely more visible if inter-individual relations were the brute and unreserved translation of relations of production. in the last instance. There is obviously a link.The Moment of Communization linked by ‘relations of production’ are just those which the same relations define: it is the position in the relation of production which determines the entities. tenuous and complex but nonetheless palpable... the sociability at the office. But it is a link. the posture of bodies in the large metropoles. but a reduction of all relations.

. But this would be to forget that every point of contact between the community and its exterior would be the occasion to see the ‘relations of production’ reassert their rights and reintroduce the whole community into class relations: juridical statutes of occupied buildings and land.
Sexto
Call is an ‘alternative’33 text because the existence of communism is considered as possible at a moment when capitalism still reigns.. moments of communism are already to be had. the supply of provisions. Sure.. productivity standards.
68
. to organize. the sale of the surplus. would a community whose members worked in common and didn’t engage in monetary relations among themselves thereby escape ‘relations of production’? On the condition of transforming communism into a series of principles to be respected we might perhaps be able to maintain the illusion for a while. and its only after the insurrection. for the latter must first constitute itself as a force and ‘deepen’ itself as a preliminary to revolution. The point is only to recognize them. Nonetheless the sense of the text is clear: even in the form of fragments. the moment of acceleration of the process..Communization and its Discontents
Quito
Any workers’ cooperative can abolish ‘relations of production’ between its members in the sense understood by Call. that communism establishes itself as the universal social relation. commercialization. of ‘grace’ to research. and on that basis. Would it thereby free itself from capitalist valorization? Financial circuits. energy. of instants to explore and reproduce. Similarly. it’s not seen as communism in its final state. everything is there so that the workers of the cooperative self-exploit as surely as if the boss was still physically looming over them.

and in durably coexisting with the state and wage labor. To take an example which has nothing to do with Call. The inverse position holds that. as long capital as a social
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. but which is significant because it is caricatural. at the same time. Certainly the actions and demonstrations weren’t characterized by an extreme violence. Being ‘alternative’ consists in the belief that we can.The Moment of Communization
Septimo
I don’t agree with Dauvé. There were no doubt tensions between a more ‘activist’ tendency and those who wanted above all to defend the marvelous experience of this self-managed camp. one could recall that in the No Border camp of Strasbourg 2002 this tendency was present to a very large degree. In irreconcilable and violent conflict with it (to the point of illegality). but many people pursued these two objectives whilst seeing them as perfectly complementary. It differs therefore from the alternative which searches (and often succeeds) in making itself accepted at the margin. with limited numbers of people.34 Pacifism plays no part in the necessary definition of the alternative: those who one could call the ‘confrontational alternatives’ are far from being marginal in this type of movement. establish relations within the world of capital which would be already a prefiguration of communism (even if one doesn’t use this term). This camp organized against the Shengen information system (SIS). an ephemeral ‘self-organized’ village lived by certain members as a veritable Temporary Autonomous Zone (with the all the folklore one can imagine) and a week of disruptive actions in the city of Strasbourg. for whom Call is exempt from all trace of the alternative because communization is defined as antagonistic to this world. drew together between one and two thousand people and was the occasion for.35 but they were in any case all explicitly anti-legalist and sought to defy the state on its terrain.

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. putting itself in crisis. Thus those who often designate themselves as alternative imagine therefore that. language. nothing which can resemble communism can be lived. ceasing to be sexist or patriarchal through a series of measures which address behavior. The latter will often shrink from the appellation ‘alternative’ precisely because they fear being assimilated to pacifism. in squats. etc. and those who adhere to their theses. moments can be lived which approximate a society liberated from capital. For example. for example. One also finds those who think that only the struggle offers today the possibility of living moments of communism: the alternative is for them indissociable from anti-capitalist activism. This leads the members of TC. Certain of these alternatives are pacifist. waging war.Communization and its Discontents relation is not abolished. and ‘domination’. whose concept of the ‘self-transformation of proletarians’ draws attention to the hiatus which can exist between what can be lived in the society of capital and what will be lived after the moment that communism will have been produced. or wherever else. It’s in the last category that one could range those who write: ‘No experience of communism at the present time can survive without getting organized. from money. in places like the No Border camp at Strasbourg. in Théorie Communiste (TC). or in the Vaag camp which followed it. And that all this can come from an effort of individuals to free themselves from bad ‘ideas’ that society has inculcated in them. to see in every practical attempt to pose the communist question a demonstration of the inevitably ‘alternative’ character of every maneuver of this type. Others think that their desires are not compatible with the maintenance of the society of capital and are perfectly ready for illegal or violent struggle. tying itself to others.’ (p.65) At the other extreme a rigorously anti-alternative position can be found.

even if it’s impossible today to live something which ‘tends towards’ communism or prefigures it. that it is possible to practically address problematics related to communism. We start selling as a commodity the very struggle against the commodity.8-9) Or again: And then there is this mystification: that caught in the course of a world that displeases us. alternatives to find. are not themselves communist. to discuss it in a calm way.36 The point is to take account of the essential critique addressed to the ‘alternative’ (no possibility of developing communism within the world of capital). between
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. there would be proposals to make. in other words. chauvinist feminism. and anti-fascist lynchings. We reproduce under the pretext of an ‘alternative’ the worst kind of dominant relationships. but to recognize that there is also necessarily a relation between that which proletarians are today and that which will one day allow them to produce communism.The Moment of Communization There is also the position that I have developed in ‘Three Theses on Communization’. That we could. but that the responses that it brings.
Octavo
We do find in Call an explicit critique of the ‘alternative’: By dint of seeing the enemy as a subject that faces us – instead of feeling it as a relationship that holds us – we confine ourselves to the struggle against confinement. Hence we get the authorities of the anti-authoritarian struggle. lift ourselves out of the situation that we are in. cobbled together with what capital renders possible today. I’ve thus argued that the communizing movement is characterized by the fact that it already poses in struggles questions which have the same nature as those which will lead to the production of communism at the moment of the revolution. (pp. in other words.

at least the communism of the pre-revolutionary period. We are irremediably there.Communization and its Discontents reasonable people. As its practice is manifestly not communist. In effect. this area has the temptation to locate the unique reason for the nonexistence of responses to the communising questions that it poses in the weakness of its force or activity. Yet the question is still to understand why Call. Even more: it is this communism: ‘The practice of com72
. But no. There is no outside to the world civil war. nonetheless leans irresistibly towards it? The response can be perhaps found in Proposition VI: ‘In a general way. It’s in this sense that Call is representative of a debate which traverses the area which poses the question of communization. the party in question in Call directly produces communism. there is nothing beyond the situation. we do not see how anything else but a force. whilst the Leninist party prepares the revolution.
Nono
We can easily understand that the Party that Call speaks of has nothing to do with an avant-garde. could pursue the offensive until the very moment of dislocation’ (p. whilst posing a critique of the alternative. All the difficulty of revolutionary theory can be found hidden beneath this phrase: the point is to understand the overthrowing of capitalism as a process that is not itself capitalist – since in the end it has the capacity to destroy capitalism – and yet is nonetheless born within the capitalist social relation.70). or more precisely the coup d’état. a reality able to survive the total dislocation of capitalism.74) It must be said that the second critique is more addressed to the pacifist alternative than to the alternative tout court. and cannot be. could truly attack it. (p.

it is the whole camp. This call is addressed to them. this period in which capital has in a certain manner absorbed the totality of social reality rather than remaining restricted to the productive process. its covered trucks and its bridgeheads in the metropole? It seems more and more absurd that some of us still have to work for capital – aside from the necessary tasks of infiltration.. under empire.” When we overcome an obstacle together or when we reach a higher level of sharing. It englobes even those who have not yet had any association: ‘Certainly others.’ (p. the Party could be nothing but this: the formation of sensibility as a force. be that didn’t have its farms. its medicines.”’ (p. as we live it. with the process of capitalist valorization’ (p. is that any activity is capable of becoming a part of the process of valorization. at an impasse. that is to say something not susceptible to argument:
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. which concludes the work with a ‘bet’. its schools.66-7) But can one really believe that if we are no longer employed by this or that firm or government we cease to ‘work for capital’? And that one has thereby effected a ‘secession . its printers.65) The ticks of language the most revealing of the alternative temptation which progressively bares itself out in Call are systematically associated with the evocation of the party: Looking closer at it. It is recognized in the last paragraph. (pp. who we do not know yet.The Moment of Communization munism. its arms.10)? That which distinguishes real subsumption. The deployment of an archipelago of worlds. we call “the Party. we say that “we are building the Party. What would a political force. in strategic terms. its editing desks..65) The Party is not the avant-garde. its collective houses. are building the Party elsewhere. that is.
Decimo
Call ends.

Places to get organized.57). and in fact there are only two. Even the LETS. we need places. An experience such as that can only subsist as long as it respects the legality of capital. its covered trucks and its bridgeheads in the metropole’ going to hide? Such activities have no need to be subversive to be repressed. which would signify defeat. to drive. its collective houses. Call accords. to work. without the corresponding diplomas. All the alternative communities which have existed for a certain time resolved the question in the same way. There remains only the wager on the existence of another term.88) How is the material force in formation. The space as a point of assembly in the struggle is a mode of organization which has proven itself. its printers. a thin ridge. contracts or licenses. To cooperate. it is forbidden to practice medicine. and you will have once again destroyed yourselves. There is nothing to stop those who have the means creating hospitals.Communization and its Discontents
We will be told: you are caught in an alternative which will condemn you in one way or another: either you manage to constitute a threat to empire. (p. In the end. But on what possible basis can we say they are ‘communizing’? The condition of the confrontation with the legality of capital is to not become attached to a place. to share and develop the required techniques. its schools. to concretely escape repression? Where are ‘its farms. schools. the local exchange systems. its medicines. much importance to spaces: ‘For this. But inherent to such spaces is the need to ceaselessly efface themselves before the repression that they attract:
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.’ (p. its arms. or a durable movement. a structure. or private collective farms. in which case you will be quickly eliminated. or you will not manage to constitute such a threat. its editing desks. just enough for us to walk on. everything is illegal: without even speaking of arms. Just enough for all those who can hear to walk and live. To learn to handle all that may prove necessary. were once in the firing line of the financial regulators. the party. with reason.

in the very heart of the world of capital. Even reflection on the most interesting historical examples on this subject – Spain in the ’30s. It is this kind of thing that Call misses completely. Communism. What will be the communizing measures. insurrection. those which will allow the concrete production of communism? One can certainly have an opinion on this question. Yet this communism as universal social relation. the growth of a communist camp which reinforces and deepens itself through self-organization is that the way thus traced becomes exclusive of all others. As messianic as the conceptions of communism in Call might be. Italy in the ’70s – will never permit us to predict the future to that degree. rather than being produced collectively and universally by the proletariat destroying capital in forms that we cannot determine in advance. Yet. if it exists one day. will be produced in circumstances (the general crisis of social relations.The Moment of Communization when they eternalize themselves it is simply the sign that they have ceased to be active. is predefined by the configurations that one can give it today. they will always remain the product of present times: and they invariably lack the possible richness of definitions of communism as a universal social relation. but how can we say whether this opinion can grasp at present what communization will or will not be. In calling for the constitution of a communist camp on the basis of what it defines in the present as communism. the total destruction of capitalism) whose actual development remains for the most part unknown to us. Call freezes its vision of
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. the conception that we can have today of communism is itself to be historicized.
Uno décimo
One of the regrettable consequences of the manner in which Call envisages. under capitalism. it is implicated in a stage of development of capitalism.

Communization and its Discontents communism. ‘worked for capital’. Entitled WE [NOUS]. to judge the chaotic evolutions of future class struggles? It will only judge them communist insofar as they join it. since it will itself be communism. those who’ve known how to perform ‘secession’. until then. Already the tone of Call. whilst the others. moments. suggests a separation between ‘good’ communists. and it will act as their censor. and those forms that are capable of self-organization in the Party are alone communist.
Duo decimo
Call falls into a common trap for those who try to pose the question of communization in an at least somewhat practical manner: the responses that we try to bring forward today seem to define a space which only veritable insurgents could populate. How can we imagine that we can create communism while proposing a revolutionary strategy of which the first measure is rupture with all those who ‘work for capital’? Especially since a good reason to one day produce communism would perhaps be precisely to have. and circumstances that it will not have been able to foresee. Moreover. According to its logic. Call affirms that all those who want communism must cease to work for capital. As if all those who haven’t already seceded will never be able to intervene in communization. supposing that it is formed along the lines delineated in Call. and ‘bad’ proletarians who’ve done nothing other than submit to capital. often very severe. represented
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. remain nothing but proletarians integrated to capital. The Party will miss everything that will develop in the forms. only those communizing forces capable of self-organizing under capital will be capable of carrying out an insurrection tomorrow. those who remain apart from this insurgency. A journal published in Toulouse is quite representative of this manner of thinking. this zine presents on the cover of its 7th issue a drawing of a person walking on a tightrope over a canyon which separates US [NOUS] from the world of capital. How is the Party.

It is the we of a position’ (p. It is made explicit in the following formula: ‘The overthrowing of capitalism will come from those who are able to create the conditions for other types of relations’ (p. nuclear power plants. as a road to communism. yet the revolution will be at the same time the moment of disobjectification of the capitalist social relation and that of the desubjectification of the question of communization. the we of a group. but also powerless workers and anesthetized television viewers.
Terco decimo
We avoid the foregoing trap if we recognize that. The revolution will not simply be the act of squatters or ex-squatters! To think the contrary is to believe that revolution will only come about on the condition that revolutionary subjectivity has won over the masses. cops. But this position is the one that affirms on the back-cover that ‘WE HAVE BEGUN’.10).37 Certainly Call takes care to not oppose US and THEM. in our epoch.38 The WE [NOUS] of Call (like that of Toulouse) is open: ‘The “we” [NOUS] that speaks here is not a delimitable. One can happily think that a generalized crisis of social relations will introduce many other modes of adhesion to the communist idea. Those who have begun have already advanced on the road to revolution.The Moment of Communization by factories.67). only that which its authors have chosen to follow: here is the sense of a ‘WE’ which is finally less a position than a trajectory. NOUS and ON. isolated we. all the responses that can be found to the question of communization are the responses of our epoch: that is to say destined to become obsolete from the moment that the situation will be sufficiently modified so that an until then
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. In effect certain of those who find themselves in ‘the area that poses the question of communization’ have been able to live a form of ‘secession’: but such a rupture inscribes itself in a logic of an epoch where communization is a marginal question. but paraphrasing Heidegger. Call imagines. bosses. In this regard the manner in which Call employs the first person plural is not totally innocent. houses.

To want to wage a struggle whilst freeing oneself from all mediations put in place by capital (unions. etc. Clearly all experimental practices are not for that reason communist. a response to a
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. which at the same time subtracts nothing from its value. on the condition that they are in the context of as struggle. workers’ councils. can also be an example. at a given moment. Every contemporary practice which would like to be communizing must therefore recognize that it responds inadequately to a badly posed question. this question. is itself historic. media.39 Indeed – why not? – searching for a collective life and ‘different’ relations. as forms simply rehabilitated in a purely capitalist framework. factory occupations. politics. The communizing problematic. can only enrich itself from new significations and unforeseen developments within the evolution of a dynamic situation which will see the fall of the capitalist social relation. but which can just as easily be one place of artistic promotion among others. The same for general assemblies. etc. For the question and its answer are inadequate to serve as the measure of that which the future of communism as a universal social relation could be. and which can reveal itself as subsequently determinant for the possibility of producing communism. practices. which will be modified with the arrival of a revolutionary period.) is an obvious example of a manner of posing questions which treat of communization. just like the conception that we can have of communism.Communization and its Discontents minority question is in everyone’s mouth. but they are completely adequate to give to contemporary struggles a meaning that they wouldn’t possess without them. already diverse at present. This is exactly the case with squats which were at a certain moment a response in terms of organization and everyday life to a number of similar questions.e. All these forms of struggle can be. and they can even be taken up in a sense which has no communizing sense. i. It is thus not only the responses to the communizing problematic. If the point of continuity between current struggles and the revolution is indeed the question of communization. but also the questions posed. law.

)
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.’ (translation: Endnotes.The Moment of Communization communizing problematic. as they can be the contrary. The hypostasis of one of these forms can only become an ideology.’ we must respond: ‘the conditions for other types of relations will be created by those who are able to overthrow capitalism.
Quarto decimo
To the formula of Call which says: ‘the overthrowing of capitalism will come from those who are able to create the conditions for other types of relations.

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Frames of Struggle
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4
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There is a curious trait shared by many disparate. These concepts have been given different. inflections by various authors and schools of thought. and whose future appears ever bleaker. achieving a certain circulation and even gaining a foothold in what one could call the spontaneous philosophy or common sense of some political activism. the ideas of common. Whether deindustrialisation is viewed
. communism and commune have come to occupy the radical political imagination.Now and Never Alberto Toscano
In recent years. sometimes incommensurable. But they also register the lack. and often mutually hostile. branches of contemporary anticapitalist theory: the epochal defeats of workers’ and communist movements are recoded as preconditions or signs of a possible victory. but their current prominence and diffusion may be regarded as indicative of a lowered tolerance for a social order whose returns are ever-diminishing. or the refusal. of a ‘classical’ revolutionary image of emancipation that would identify the subjects and mechanisms capable of transforming this world into another one.

away from the disastrous compromises and collusions that marred the mainstream. that for all
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. Long Live Communism!40 – could serve as the motto for much thinking in this vein. an expatriated Marxism and a hypothetical communism characterise much of the theoretical panorama of the radical Left. Central to the critical repertoire of dissident communists towards the official movement was the claim that the latter had abandoned the project of revolution.43 But what is it to be a theoretical heretic after the political death of orthodoxy? This is not an otiose question: being orphaned of one’s overbearing and intimate enemy (the dominant communist and workers’ movement). today’s partisans of a communism reloaded detect signs of hope in the social and political realities that pushed scores into renegacy or despair. the habits of opposition die hard.41 Indeed. has marked a watershed in the interlinked histories of dissident communisms.Communization and its Discontents as a response to the emancipatory flight of labor from the factory or the collapse of the party-form is welcomed as heralding a truly generic communism unburdened from bureaucratic authority.) as the occasion for re-establishing their practice on a theoretically firm and politically coherent platform. situationists. etc. Though. Trotskyists.42 To different degrees. On one level. The title of a collection of texts by the group Tiqqun – Everything’s Failed. the discursive domain in which contemporary theoretical communisms exists is a markedly different one than it was even a couple of decades ago. declaring the foreignness to a true communism of the hegemonic organizations in the workers’ movement and of socialist states was the raison d’être of many of the political traditions that formed those thinkers who today continue to proclaim themselves communists. as indicated by the periodic exorcisms of the determinist Marxist bogeyman. betrayal or collapse of official socialisms or Marxisms has frequently been perceived by dissident communists (councilists. there is nothing particularly novel about this: the stagnation. workerists. Significantly. the separation from the deadening weight of the Soviet monolith has not translated into the much-vaunted liberation of political energies that many on the far Left announced around 1989.

say by the regulation of financial transaction. together with the adulteration of ‘reform’ into a concept synonymous with neoliberal adjustment (as in ‘pension reform’). for instance. opening up the possibility for a reformist path to socialism through unionization. The upshot of this predicament is the proliferation of an intransitive politics – by which I mean the idea of emancipation and equality no longer as objectives of a drawn-out programme.Frames of Struggle of its own condemnations of the limits of social-democracy and the dangers of opportunism. whose temporality one could discern in the post-war Fordism of the Golden Thirties. In fact. as both viable and desirable). whose tendencies to crisis would be neutralized by credit. social reforms and the democratization of the state – that is on a theory of the virtuous dialectic in the capitallabor relation. not only was such adaptation
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. or some neo-Keynesian compromise. the unification of capitals and the perfecting of the means of communication. in Rosa Luxemburg’s famous polemic against Eduard Bernstein44 – appear to have fallen by the wayside. Among the features of this dissidence without orthodoxy is the struggle to generate a contemporary concept of revolution. has had remarkably deep effects on the radical political imagination. For Luxemburg. it had sunk into a sterile gradualism (in the capitalist countries) or perpetuated capitalism itself under conditions of bureaucratic domination (in the socialist ones). a strategy and/or a transition. in a fusion of means and ends that seems to abrogate the entire temporal framework of reform and revolution. I would suggest that the seemingly inexorable collapse of any reformist project. Socialdemocratic reformism was founded on a theory of capitalism’s (more or less limitless) capacities for adaptation. The parameters of the classical distinction between reform and revolution – present. but as matters of immediate practice. and on its very vocabulary. accompanied by the tendency to refuse the idea that anything like reform is possible in the present (contrary to the kind of gradualist positions that would see a domestication of capitalism.

has little if any mobilising power or plausibility. the barbaric or nihilistic propensities of a capitalism that is increasingly exclusionary of an unemployed and surplus humanity. save. In this light. For all of its internal variations and differends. however. often in the guise of a repudiation of political memory and a critique of teleology – a forma mentis that when repressed tends to return more or less surreptitiously. a collapse both assumed and accelerated by conscious revolutionary masses.or even anti-historical form should be no surprise to the historical materialist. for instance in the guise of various forms of spontaneous. This optimism of reason is not so widespread. joined with the reflux of the labor movement. association and sociality explicitly forsake the language of history.Communization and its Discontents illusory (and we could easily turn our minds today to the vicious rather than virtuous relation between credit. That the tentative recovery of the political idea of communism in the present should take an a. and I would suggest that the critical or anticapitalist common sense is that there are no immanent tendencies or dispositions that augur a transition. and this is hardly encouraging. organized revolutionary politics and of anti-imperial liberation struggles means that the idea of an egalitarian overcoming of the capitalist mode of production. the bond between the temporality of capitalist development and that of class struggle and formation. and for some irreversibly. the loss of a theory tying together the time of action and the materiality of history renders certain contemporary debates on communism more formal than strategic. communication and big capital) but the revolutionary perspective necessitates the eventuality of a collapse of capitalism. insurgent. which more or less contend that emancipation is latent in social trends. the current radical or communist renascence in theory can thus be negatively character88
. or reticular revolution. a notion of capitalism as the bearer of real propensities towards alternate forms of production. At an uneven and global scale. It is symptomatic that even those who seek to maintain. in however mutant a guise. and menacingly. destructive of the very natural basis for human social existence. written inexorably into the latter’s tendency.

it is the saturation of the political sequences linked to class and party.
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. with the thoroughgoing post-Fordist restructuring and decomposition of the industrial working class is a politics of species-being possible. be they reformist or revolutionary. class subjectivity and political organization into a strategic and temporal framework – ‘reform or revolution’ (or even revolutionary reforms.Frames of Struggle ised by the apparent abeyance of the reform/revolution dyad. The first is that the loss of the theoretical schema that tied together capitalist development. which at last allows us to revive an ‘invariant’ communist idea. reconstitution and production of commons as the transversal and transhistorical impetus of a communism at last unburdened of stageism. or. in which the affirmation of equality is not subordinated to the imperatives and instrumentalities of power. which in classical Marxisms was politically translated into various imaginaries and strategies of transition. the essence of defeat appears to be a kind of victory: only now. that is. capitalist crisis. being neither revolutionary instruments nor tactical expedients. in a different vein. it is with the planetary expansion of a neoliberalism hell-bent on accumulation by dispossession that we can recognize the defence. or again. neither strategic steps nor elements of a transitional programme. Two things can be noted at this point.or anti-historical communism. the generation of an a. Intransigent opposition to the perpetuation of capitalist relations of exploitation and domination coexists with proposed measures (from the social wage to the unconditional regularization of all ‘illegal’ workers) which do not fit into the politics of time of classical Marxism. The second very significant feature of the recent discussion of communism (as well as of related terms like common and commune) is the manner in which the loss or repudiation of the historico-political imaginary of the overcoming of capitalism. or non-reformist reforms) – means that the field in which contemporary communist theorists stake their political positions has uncertain contours. has been accompanied by historicizing reflections explaining why the transitive politics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (whether reformist or revolutionary) has become obsolescent. and by the concurrent problematization of the progressive schema of communism’s overcoming of capitalism. Here too.

of the abolition of the value-form. and the classic.Communization and its Discontents Eurocentrism and a technophilic productivism. From an external. in this conjunction of
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. theoretical sketch. With the foregoing. class and revolution remain unequivocally in the foreground of TC and Endnotes texts. in what is not a contribution to communization theory itself – the existence of a broad set of contemporary theoretical proposals staking a claim to communism but refusing the politics of transition is of considerable significance. if not necessarily for the formulation of a theory of communisation (which has its own genealogies in the European ultra-Left45) then at least for its reception. and broadly diagnostic position – such as the one taken here. What’s more. conception of communism as the real movement of the destruction of capitalist social relations. Troploin. in conjunction with what appear to be a root-andbranch jettisoning of the political legacies of the workers’ and socialist movements. to my mind. there are affinities worthy of note between a kind of communist air du temps and the specific theoretical proposals of Théorie Communiste (TC). Both the promise and the limitations of communization theory. Whether we view them as profound conjunctural commonalities. I wanted to provide a context of sorts. are to be found. there is a much greater degree of fidelity to a certain Marxian theoretical framework. and admittedly impressionistic. There is no denying that the refusal of a transitional understanding of communist politics. even if the reasons for promoting an intransitive communism or the visions of political action consequent upon it may differ widely. is at the center of their reflections. if very often neglected. Endnotes and others. Thus. family resemblances or misleading surface-effects (I would opt for the first). and the related historicization of that refusal in terms of the theory of real subsumption and the analysis of ‘programmatism’ (on which see the essays by Theorié Communiste and Endnotes in this volume) make the position outlined by communization theory both unique and uniquely reflexive relative to the theoretical panorama sketched above.

the extension of the situation where everything is freely available as the unification of human activity – in a word.Frames of Struggle value-theoretical rigor and political repudiation of Marxist and communist traditions. approaching their complex and in many ways compelling analyses of value and class struggle from the vantage point of the rejection of the politics of transition. cannot be got rid of by halves.46 Communization is the destruction of the commodity-form and the simultaneous establishment of immediate social relations between individuals. it does not have communism as a project and result. from TC and Endnotes respectively: In the course of revolutionary struggle. of exchange. or in the end perhaps because of. the coherence of its theoretical analyses. The revolution is communization. the ultra-Left ones included. In what follows. the abolition of the state.47 Some salient features of communization theory can be drawn from these definitions: the refusal of a separation between means and ends in revolutionary practice. the immediacy of both revolution and of the social
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. Value. but as its very content. the idea that revolution is directly aimed at the value-form and the capital-relation. Inevitably. dimensions of communization theory. of all forms of property. though I would maintain that the paucity of strategic and political reflection within communization theory is debilitating notwithstanding. or better anti-political. the abolition of classes – are ‘measures’ that abolish capital. I want to dwell on the problems I discern in the political. Let us take two definitions of communization. understood as a total form of social mediation. of the division of labor. imposed by the very necessities of struggle against the capitalist class. this will mean providing a truncated critique of arguments that have the considerable virtue of operating at the level of the totality.

This is in many respects a virtue. especially in contrast to the shallow optimism of those who claim we’ve already won the world. namely the Chinese Communist Party. The organizational reasons are obvious enough: the collapse or attenuation of those collective bodies that could project a path for a subject through space and time. makes strategic thought largely residual or speculative (unless we include those entities. Let us call these. and in the face of adverse structures and subjects.48 refuse to countenance the notion that embryos or zones of communism exist in the present. which communization theory disavows at its peril. problems of communist strategy. both classical and contemporary. I want to indicate some domains of communist theorizing. the theorists of communization. But the salutary emphasis on communism as the real movement of the destruction of value as a social form risks trading off theoretical coherence and purity for practical irrelevance. of communist power. Unlike many of their contemporaries. With the aim of sounding out the political limits of the anti-political character of communization theory. whose largely successful strategy has involved jettisoning allegiance to communist principles). It would be a bitter irony if the refinement of revolutionary theory made revolutionary practice inconceivable. The Leninist catechism once had it that there’s no revolutionary movement without revolutionary theory. If something marks out the contemporary resurgence of theoretical interest in communism. across its various species. but simply need to shake off the husk of capitalist domination. But there are also historical sources for the waning of strategy:
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.Communization and its Discontents relations it generates. while affirming the historical immanence of communist possibilities against any (overtly or crypto-humanist) vision of communism’s invariance. in order. it is the almost total neglect of the question of strategy. These propositions stress the radical novelty and negativity of communism when considered in the context of the present. of communist culture and of communist transition.

that these setbacks were written into the history of subsumption. which is to say of revolution (a notion they have the consistency to put at the front and center of their theorizing. unlike most of their contemporaries). mutated into bureaucratic despotisms. But can we abandon strategy along with political modernity? When communization theorists address the question of politics. from class alliance to tactical retreat. they do so on the basis of a curious presupposition: to wit. as in today’s China). citizenship.
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. TC have argued (against the voluntarist strain of communization theory of Nesic & Dauvé or Troploin). that a struggle which is directly and uncompromisingly targeted at the abolition of capitalist value-relations is the only kind capable of bringing about communist victory. or were recuperated into capitalism (even as its unlikely ‘saviors’.49 The collusion of modern forms of political abstraction with value’s domination and commensuration of human activity can also account for why communization theory presents us with a trenchantly non.or anti-modern (but certainly not postmodern) Marxism. war. territorial liberation and internationalism. This anti-strategic strategy – which consciously repudiates the entire panoply of strategic reflection in the communist camp. but social. from united front to seizure of power – seems to me to confuse a historical judgment with a theoretical proposition. and echoing the Engels of The Peasant War in Germany. but popular war. but democratic and popular. rather than amounting to simple subjective or organizational failings. With considerable orthodoxy.Frames of Struggle all the subversive strategies have both borrowed and reversed the political categories of modernity: sovereignty. beginning with the overturning of all their spatiotemporal conditions. So it is not surprising that the crisis of the political paradigm of modernity is mirrored by the crisis in the strategies of subversion. The judgment is widespread enough: all efforts at communism that did not venture immediately to abolish value-relations and concomitantly to abolish the revolutionary class itself were defeated.

anti-strategic varieties of communism have any better chances of dislocating the domination of the value-form – far from it. rather than the collapse of social reproduction tout court. faced with the extremely unlikely (or impossible) prospect of a politics capable of living up to its standards of coherent negation. does not mean it was the wrong problem all along. other than the historical failures of their contraries. as I would be tempted to. there is no argument presented as to how communization could amount to a successful strategy. in which no revolutionary practice will ever overcome the stringent constraints of revolutionary theory. Given that. no) examples of communization than of transition as actually existing practices. Why the collapse of capitalist forms of social reproduction.Communization and its Discontents One could of course counter. or of transition) has not been solved. cultural. it will slip into a kind of tragic fatalism. it should be noted that the totalizing linearity of the conception of the history of real subsumption proposed by communization theory results in a presentation of the current conjuncture as one in which capital’s production of sameness has rendered the questions of spatial. and geopolitical difference
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. in what regard the refusal of the separation between the military. the social and the political. it is obscure on what grounds. The rather fanciful descriptions of revolutionary activity in some writings on communization suggest that. Even if we accept that all transitional strategies are doomed. by the communization theorists’ own lights. we are to accept that the immediate negation of capitalist relations is the best path towards the effective negation of capitalist relations. Similarly. this does not in any way suggest that intransitive. could serve revolutionary communizing movements in struggles against highly centralized and differentiated martial and repressive apparatuses with seemingly limitless capabilities for organized violence remains a mystery. As an important corollary to this problem of strategy. the avowed consequence of communization. would herald the construction of communist social relations. there are even fewer (that is. we are not told. that just because a problem (that of communist strategy. But even if we accepted the premises of communization theory.

whatever the
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. patience or urgency. The coercive excrescence of the state. or in the theorization of revolutionary dual power as the vanishing mediator on the path to overthrowing the capitalist state. as ‘programmatism’). Among the obvious components of any strategic thought is the element of power. Again.52 the question of the organized capacity for antagonism loomed large.50 with different shapes and in different rhythms. communization theory takes its account of real subsumption as warrant to sideline all of these problems.Frames of Struggle obsolete. moral or military.51 Rather than confronting the problems that beset the construction of effective solidarities across polities. Is this because the theories of transition that characterized ‘programmatism’ were all predicated on calculating the power of the class. appear to depend on the extrapolation of an already streamlined Euro-American history to the whole globe. and judging the context and timing of its political action? Be it in the formation of popular or united fronts. concentration or dispersal – the options taken depend largely on estimations of power. for reasons of stageism or expediency. Advance or retreat. The narrative of the mutations of the class-relation. which we owe to a historico-geographical materialism of the necessarily uneven and combined development of capitalism. of workers’ identity. be it material. action on the action of others. thereby ignoring precisely those very real obstacles which demand strategic reflection instead of the rather unscientific presupposition that everything will be resolved in the struggle. The idea that class formation may still be occurring elsewhere. the shifting capabilities of groups. and with it of struggle in and against it. and especially across a transnational division of labor which is employed by capital for ends at once disciplinary and exploitative. the shaping of political subjectivities by social mechanisms and ideologies – these issues are absorbed by the systemic periodization of class (de)composition and class struggle. But communization theory seems to hold this concern in little regard. is rejected. together with the axiom that communization must spread like the proverbial planetary prairie fire or simply not be. as is the entire conceptualization. and of their political manifestations (namely.

these differences will surely matter. it regards with (mostly warranted) suspicion the proliferation of positions which hold that we can struggle in the present in ways which prefigure a post-capitalist future. such positions – advocacies of global transitional demands
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. What’s more. communization theory stands out for the insistence with which it refuses the consolations of the enclave or the pieties of the alternative. of the distinction between economic and extra-economic coercion. Short of treating the historical mutations of the class-relation as themselves the sources of class power. to envisage immanent alternatives to capitalism. for instance. if it is to translate into strategy. take explicitly repressive or co-optive forms. it is difficult to see how. with whom and with what to undertake communization is surely not an otiose question. unless we treat the capabilities of the state as themselves entirely subsumed by capital. cannot do without some theory of power. for strategic purposes. The obstacles to communization may. When. In the present panorama of anticapitalisms. In its nigh-on ascetic fixation on the abolition of the value-form as the sine qua non of communist theory and practice. it would appear necessary to consider the relevance. on pain of a self-defeating voluntarism. capitalism). just as the capital-relation reproduces itself through the gun. as a thoroughgoing theory of emancipation from capital’s abstract domination. the question of class power wouldn’t arise. even or especially in communizing processes. rather than specify. the power to undertake communization (something that would smack of ‘historical mysticism’53). the ballot-box and the spectacle. communization theory. how. Unwittingly. and thus for the particular shape taken by communizing activity. in the context of the widespread opposition to neoliberalism and globalization (terms which often substitute for. Among the analytical attractions of communization theory is the way in which it permits us to historicize and critique recent attempts.Communization and its Discontents historical and political judgment passed on these specific strategies. If communization is to be more than a formalistic theory or a pure (which is to say metaphysical) activity. that is. something that seems unpersuasive given the different articulations of state(s) and capital(s) on the present scene.

in the internal functioning of a theoretical group) need not conceive itself as a ‘liberated zone’. the strength of the prefigurative conception of communism55 is to pose the problem of how in (capitalist) social relations as they now exist.Frames of Struggle like the Tobin Tax or efforts to create liberated zones. on the basis of their critiques of theories of reform. but which at the very least begins to explore the creation of collective organs of opposition. but could be advanced as the inevitably truncated. imperfect and embryonic testing out of certain practices. The fact that communization theory treats the overcoming of instrumentality only in the struggle itself – in the guise of communizing measures inseparable from communist aims – leads to a strangely empty formalism.54 It is to the credit of communization theorists like TC that they do not advocate. one can experiment and prepare the tools for its overcoming. or transition. which tells us next to nothing about the forms that the
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. But remarking the limit of contemporary conceptions of alternatives to capitalism cannot exempt a theory of communism from thinking through how to foster and fashion those capacities that would make the disarticulation of capitalist relations and the establishment of communist ones possible. inevitably. alternative. an emancipation that turns out to require the perpetuation of the fundamental framework of exploitation. a withdrawal from the concrete forms that present struggles take. including those which. to take a very minor but pertinent case. whether they disavow the very notion of class (struggle) or not. Such ‘radical democratisms’ can be faulted for regarding the saving of capitalism from itself as the only path to emancipation. whose role in future struggles may be undefined. the reproduction of the class-relation. and are limited by. temporary or otherwise – place themselves within. Such prefiguration (for instance. Aside from functioning as an antidote to the inertia of means that make emancipatory ends recede into a distant horizon. have as their stakes the defense of certain forms of reproduction (the welfare state).

somatized and interiorized habits and reflexes – is ignored in the bleakly optimistic view that all will be resolved in the struggle. which occupied militants.Communization and its Discontents negation of capitalist relations could take.). I would submit instead that the problem of building a proletarian capacity before a revolutionary moment. etc. treating any resurgences of ‘traditional’ organizations of the workers’ movement as merely residual – translates into the view that nothing needs to be done to prepare the kind of subjects that might take communizing action.56 or that of building a communist culture. theorists and artists in the immediate wake of the Bolshevik revolution. And even if we shy away from the capital-pessimism that would see total commodification triumphant. but also much of our everyday life has been subsumed by capital in a way that puts many a complex obstacle in the way of building up the capacity and the intelligence to negate it. that capital is based not just on a social form. by the cascading and contagious negation of all instances of the capitalrelation. The positing that real subsumption has put a labor without reserves at last into the position where self-abolition is the only object – a positing illustrated by a tendentious sampling of ‘pure’ negations (riots. and not before. as if not-capitalism and communism were synonymous. To have forcefully emphasized and rigorously investigated two indispensable elements of communist theory – the character of capitalism as a system of abstract domination based on the value-form and the vision of communism as the revolutionary self-abolition of the proletariat – is a great credit to communization theory. Whatever our historical judgment on them may be. strikes without demands. but on deeply sedimented. The realization that dogged many a twentieth-century communist theorist – to wit. posed most comprehensively by Gramsci. we can nevertheless readily admit that not just labor. remain with us as problems. That it has
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. The mutation or collapse of a working-class identity in its nineteenth and twentieth-century guises only renders this question of experimenting with non-capitalist forms of life (without reifying them into quickly atrophied ‘free zones’) more urgent.

and to do so with an attention to the present possibilities of emancipation. and that we can directly translate value theory into a diagnosis of the present. and perhaps most significantly. rather than refunctioning. weak points. as well as its historical trajectory. Reversing the valence of a term from Whitehead. The triumph of value is not the death of politics. the exegete’s mantra that communism is nothing but the movement of the abolition of the status quo should not be taken as a license to ignore the whom and how of any revolutionary process. economic and political spaces amply subsumed by the value-form you can’t make it up as you go along. Even if we accept a variant of the real subsumption thesis. laying all trust in a kind of learning-by-doing that seems wantonly indifferent to the gargantuan obstacles in the way of negating capital. The obverse of this anti-strategic treatment of
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. we could speak with respect of communization theory of a fallacy of misplaced abstraction. But the stringency of its critiques of the communist tradition has not translated into a reflexive investigation of the consequences attendant on abandoning any concept of transition. or the extinction of strategy. which takes the intensification and extension of the capital-relation as eliminating. The path is not made by walking it. and of the kinds of strategy and forms of political organization that may be up to the task of a contemporary transition. even as it abolishes itself qua labor. a sustained reflection how to turn the accreted dead labor of humanity into a resource for living labor. differences and mediations which make it possible for capitalism to function.Frames of Struggle tried to think these elements in their unity. No more than similar professions of faith in the party or the productive forces from other quarters. politics.57 It is a methodological error to presume that the real abstraction that can be registered at the level of a history of subsumption trumps the concrete uses of spatial and material differences by capital (and labor). In social. this will never mean the real obsolescence of the unevennesses. makes it a position worth engaging with for anyone preoccupied with the question of communism as a contemporary one. but will require some pretty detailed surveying of political forces.

in a more dialectical vein. class fractions) as of little moment. If real subsumption is second nature. and what converting. that such determinations will simply arise in the collective processes of abolishing the value-form. or. In a world where no object or relation is untouched by capital. it stands to reason that simple negation – with its tendency to facile fantasies of communism rising like a phoenix from the ashes of anomie and the thorough collapse of social reproduction – is no proposal at all. strategic and political question is in many ways what will require abolishing. means that the negation proposed by communization theory is poor in determinations. political forms. forms for which the refunctioning of many (though definitely not all) of the devices which permit the reproduction of capital will be necessary. and New York City a natural fact. But the homogenizing characterization of capitalism’s social abstraction. This appears to derive from two main factors. it makes much more sense to conceive a non-capitalist future as one that will involve infinitely more varied and more complex forms of social mediation. the logistical. and the treatment of its further mediations (ideology. As authors from Fourier to Harvey have suggested. already alluded to in regard to the problem of strategy. what is to be negated without remainder and what sublated.58 then a communizing movement will need to experiment with how to transform a world in which relations of exploitation and domination are present all the way down. especially in light of the formidable organizational and logistical difficulties that face any attempt to undo the ubiquitous identification of social existence and capitalist mediation – not to mention the often catastrophic challenges previously confronted by really-existing communisms. It will need to dominate domination with the aim of non100
. I can see no reason to have such confidence. If the world we inhabit is one that has been thoroughly shaped by the history of capital (and of class struggle).Communization and its Discontents capitalist abstraction is the conception of communization as the immediate (in both senses of the term) negation of capitalism. The first is the hopeful conviction. The second factor is the entirely untenable notion that communism involves ‘direct social relations’.

and so on and so forth – and of necessity temporal.60 will simply return communism to the melancholy domain of the idea or the enclave. as well as the inevitable continuation of capitalist forms in post-capitalist futures.
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. The question is not whether communism requires a thinking of transition. without allowing their deeply embedded capitalist and dominative potentialities to assert themselves? Negation alone is not going to do the job. And a refusal of the sober realism that accepts the necessary alienation59 and inevitable hierarchy of certain systems. train-lines.Frames of Struggle domination. The problem of transition will not go away by fiat. pharmaceuticals. chemicals. This is a problem at once material – a question of buildings. How can we redeem and redirect our dead labors? How can we control the very systems that control us. or transitions. power-grids. but which transition. ports. have any chance in the present.

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in other words. to show how the process by which capital is reproduced necessarily also reproduces the potential for the emancipatory transformation of capitalist society. the society that rests on exchange value. Marx uses the metaphor of mines that are ready to explode capitalist production from within. He aims.Capitalism: Some Disassembly Required Nicole Pepperell
Marx aims to present an immanent critique of the reproduction of capital. suggesting that emancipatory social movements mobilize an arsenal that has been inadvertently built by the very social practices they seek to transform: [W]ithin bourgeois society. if we did not find concealed in society as it is the material conditions of production and the corresponding relations of exchange prerequisite for a classless society. In the Grundrisse. there arise relations of circulation as well as of production which are so many mines to explode it. then all attempts to explode it would be quixotic. whose antithetical character can never be abolished through quiet metamorphosis. On the other hand.)61
. (A mass of antithetical forms of the social unity.

whose technical and social character drives a progression toward socialized forms of ownership and democratic forms of self-government. Contemporary social form theories generally point back to Lukács’ seminal ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’. On one side are approaches that emphasize how capitalism generates objective potentials for transformation – through the development of the forces of production. On the other side are approaches that focus more on how capitalism generates subjective potentials for transformation – through its dependence on an ever-expanding proletarian class whose material interests oppose the social relations on which capitalist production is based.Communization and its Discontents But how does Marx understand the generation of such explosive possibilities? By what means does the reproduction of capital necessarily reproduce the potential for alternative forms of collective life? Different answers have been proposed by the Marxist tradition. and whose centrality to material production provides both emancipatory insight and transformative power. Both of these approaches came under fire in the 20th century. One response to this historical experience was a turn to theories of ‘social forms’ – structured patterns of social practice that are understood to determine both objective and subjective dimensions of capitalist societies. Three approaches to understanding emancipatory potential Two of these answers can be positioned on opposing sides of a dichotomy. which portrays capitalist society as a ‘totality’ whose structures of subjectivity and objectivity are determined by the commodity form: … at this stage in the history of mankind there is no problem that does not ultimately lead back to that question and there is no
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. as fascist mass movements and the development of totalitarian planned economies were interpreted as evidence that neither subjective nor objective conditions suffice to drive social transformation to emancipatory ends.

62 At first glance. Such theories are thus tacitly reductive – granting a privileged status to formal patterns visible beneath the flux of everyday social practice. while implicitly treating the diversity of social practice as epiphenomenal. theories of social form have tended to look through the diversity of social practice in order to pick out an underlying formal pattern. rather than a narrow ‘economic’ analysis.Frames of Struggle solution that could not be found in the solution to the riddle of the commodity-structure… the problem of commodities must not be considered in isolation or even regarded as the central problem in economics. Yet the very strength of such approaches in accounting for the failure of revolutionary expectations has arguably handicapped them in the search for emancipatory possibilities. They also appear to account better for the difficulties facing transformative social movements. They reposition Capital as a general theory of modernity. psychological structure.
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. a symbolic battle against their cultures. theories of social form appear greatly to increase the depth and sophistication of Marx’s work. suggesting that such movements must wrestle with an internal battle against their members’ psyches. and many other dimensions of social life. This problem is related to the tendency for theories of social form to remain untethered from an analysis of how the formal pattern is produced. governmental forms. This both presumes that it is possible to define the form without a concrete analysis of its production – an assumption with which Marx would have strongly disagreed – and also tends to propel the analysis into idealist forms. and they apply this theory to culture. and an institutional battle against forms of production and government that are all fundamentally shaped by the same core social forms. Since Lukács. Only in this case can the structure of commodity-relations be made to yield a model of all the objective forms of bourgeois society together with all the subjective forms corresponding to them. but as the central structural problem of capitalist society is all its aspects.

why labor is expressed in value. and has uncovered the content concealed within these forms. that is to say. in a rare explicit methodological discussion.63 as a claim that capital genuinely exhibits ‘idealist’ properties. and why the measurement of labor
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. or to analyze how the social forms are generated. So was the turn to social form theories a dead end? Would a return to theories of objective or subjective potential provide a better starting point for grasping concrete possibilities for social transformation? I argue below that Marx’s work suggests another alternative: a non-reductive theory of how concrete social practices operate in tandem to generate overarching patterns of historical change (social forms). Marx credits the political economists precisely for their insight into the social forms that characterize capitalist production: Political economy has indeed analyzed value and its magnitude.65 While theories of social form often assert the possibility for emancipatory transformation – and even argue that this potential should be associated with dimensions of social life that cannot be fully characterized by formal structures – the failure to theorize the determinate properties of these other dimensions of social life. while also and simultaneously generating a diverse array of determinate possibilities for alternative forms of collective life. however incompletely.Communization and its Discontents In the versions of social form theory dominant today. tends to render theories of social form essentially exhortative. Political Economy as Intelligent Design In the opening chapter of Capital. this latent idealism is expressed in several different forms: as pessimism.64 or as the claim that the forms are ‘quasi-autonomous’ from the social actors who create them. Their relative sophistication does not extend to the theorization of concrete emancipatory possibilities. But it has never once asked the question why this content has assumed that particular form.

by contrast. how a specific set of social forms themselves are produced. Instead. These formulas.Frames of Struggle by its duration is expressed in the magnitude of the value of the product. appear to the political economists’ bourgeois consciousness to be as much a selfevident and nature-imposed necessity as productive labor itself. the political economists stop short. He argues that. which bear the unmistakable stamp of belonging to a social formation in which the process of production has mastery over man. the political economists are able to declare capitalist production ‘natural’.66 This passage suggests that Marx does not regard the discovery of social forms to be his distinctive contribution to the critique of political economy. the political economists take the emergence of this unexpected. How else could order arise in the absence of conscious design.
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. and all previous forms of production ‘artificial’ – in spite of their knowledge that capitalist institutions are recent historical developments. evidently awestruck by the presence of structured patterns that appear to them to emerge ‘spontaneously’ from a chaotic array of social practices. instead of the opposite. he singles out the question of how content comes to assume a specific form – which is to say. Apologistically. demonstrated by the political economists’ ability to discover non-random trends beneath the chaotic flux of everyday social practice – is taken as a sign that this historically specific mode of production has been ratified by Nature and Reason. The emergence of an unplanned order – the apparent ‘intelligibility’ of capitalist production. none of which is intentionally undertaken with the goal of producing this specific aggregate result. unless current forms of production were somehow tapping into the underlying natural order that latently governs material production? For this reason. unplanned order to imply that an underlying rationality governs capitalist production.

who likewise establish two kinds of religion. a Geist. but there is no longer any.67 With this passage. or an invariant Natural Law. It may invoke the mantle of science and enlightened self-understanding. From Marx’s perspective. In this they resemble the theologians. Marx presents an alternative analysis of the process of ‘spontaneous self-organization’ that reproduces capital. accidentally generated as an unintentional side effect of a wide array of different social practices. those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions. In Capital. without falling back on mystical concepts of an intelligent designer. Marx portrays the reproduction of capital as a blind and oppressive juggernaut. For them. He compares the political economists to the Church fathers. none of which is directly oriented to achieving this aggregate
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. there are only two kinds of institutions. Every religion which is not [t]heirs is an invention of men. but it responds with a distinctly uncritical amazement when confronted by structured patterns of historical change that arise independently from conscious human will. This amazement is expressed in the unwarranted conclusion that the presence of unintentional order is evidence of the rationality or goodness of the system within which this order becomes manifest. artificial and natural.Communization and its Discontents Marx is scathing towards this apologist conclusion. The institutions of feudalism are artificial institutions. Marx declares that his project – much like Darwin’s – is driven by the desire to explain the emergence of a particular kind of order. while their own is an emanation of God… Thus there has been history. and accuses them of treating their own historically contingent social institutions as an ‘emanation of God’: The economists have a singular way of proceeding. political economy is only nominally secular.

does not make the process rational in the sense of reflecting a desirable outcome from our collective social practice. This intelligibility. Marx contests the political desirability of grounding normative standards in the ‘spontaneous’ trends of capitalist production. Marx pursues these goals by cataloguing what he calls the ‘microscopic anatomy’ of capitalist production. He argues that the reproduction of capital does generate emancipatory possibilities – but he insists that these are hindered by capitalism’s spontaneous trends: deliberate political action is required to wrest emancipatory potentials from the process by which capital is reproduced. however. if capital is to continue to be reproduced.Frames of Struggle result. form of collective life by selectively inheriting already existing social potentials. Second. This necessary internal variability then becomes key to Marx’s argument that it is possible to speciate a new. he tries to demystify the process of capital’s reproduction by cataloguing the makeshift assemblage of contingent social practices that must operate in tandem to generate this ‘spontaneous. Marx severs the enlightenment connection between law and reason. Through this analysis Marx seeks to invert the conventional ‘enlightened’ narrative of political economy in two ways.68 This catalogue is intended to produce a systematic theory of the forms of internal social variability that must necessarily be generated. The non-random character of the process cannot be taken as evidence that something beneficial will result if we allow this process to operate free of human interference. At the same time. Marx attempts to show that a number of non-beneficial consequences will predictably be generated. more emancipatory. so long as capital continues to be reproduced. by demonstrating how a blind and accidental process could arise from purely contingent human behaviours and yet still manifest lawlike qualities. self-organizing’ process. First. in order to
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. This juggernaut may not be random – it may be characterized by theorizable trends and demonstrable forms of orderly historical change – and this non-random character may make it intelligible – it may be subject to systematic theorization.

to analyze its different forms of development and to track down their inner connection. ‘The Higher Realms of Nonsense’ In an often-quoted passage from the postface to the second German edition of Capital. then it may appear as if we have before us an a priori construction. if the life of the subject-matter is now reflected back in the ideas. its implications for reading Capital are generally not fully appreciated.Communization and its Discontents produce new institutions that are better adapted to emancipatory ends. dividing it into use-value and exchange-value. Capital does not give us – immediately and on the surface – an account of Marx’s own analytical procedure. This analysis invites us to take a look at the ‘elementary form’ of the wealth of capitalist societies. But what does this mean? When we open the first chapter of Capital and begin reading what we see first is a sort of arm-chair empiricist sociological analysis. Only after this work has been done can the real movement be appropriately presented. To understand how this analysis plays out in Capital.69 While the passage is well-known. If this is done successfully. Instead.70 We do not know at this point what Marx is presenting. The latter has to appropriate the material in detail. what the text presents most immediately is a ‘method of presentation’. What we do know is that this analysis does not reflect Marx’s own personal
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. we must take a brief detour through Marx’s idiosyncratic presentational style. Marx famously distinguishes between his own method of inquiry – the forms of analysis he used to arrive at his conclusions – and his method of presentation – the way he displays his argument in Capital: Of course the method of presentation must differ in form from that of inquiry. what function this analysis might serve. and proceeds to break down the characteristics of this form.

now. Both critics and supporters of Marx have expressed incredulity at these passages. We still do not know why we are being asked to do this – but we do know. Otherwise. that is. It builds on this deduction to infer the need for the category of abstract labor. asserting that political economy does not know ‘where to have’ its categories: ‘The objectivity of commodities as values differs from Dame Quickly in the sense that “a man knows not where to have it. instead. and then to analyze some of the properties of these new categories. Marx uses a quick reference to Shakespeare to mock the forms of analysis that have just been on display. In a couple of pages. baffled at why Marx is putting forward this analysis. that the analysis with which we were initially presented must somehow be too superficial. bracket the question of what is being presented for the moment. and move on. the text invites us to ‘consider the matter more closely’71 – by contrast. and the form of argument seems profoundly problematic. The form of reasoning and analysis displayed in these opening passages – whatever it is for – is not intended to illustrate a recommended means of arriving at critical sociological insights. to the sort of analysis with which the text started.”’74 The
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. why would we need to consider the matter more closely? The text now presents a new analysis of the wealth of capitalist societies – one that moves beyond the text’s empiricist beginnings to present a very strange sort of transcendental argument. which purports to logically deduce the necessity for a ‘supersensible’ category beyond use-value and exchange-value: the category of value. part of Marx’s method of presentation.Frames of Struggle method of inquiry. It is.73 This bafflement arises because readers take these passages to exemplify Marx’s own method of inquiry.72 Many of the claims made in this section seem quite counter-intuitive. At the beginning of the third section of the chapter. He compares political economy unfavorably to Dame Quickly. We need to keep this in mind.

it could appear that we have now reached Marx’s method of inquiry: Marx may begin with taunting parodies of empiricist and transcendental analyses. At first glance. surely we have reached his analysis proper. The previous sections have left the ontological status of the wealth of capitalist society unclear: is it the straightforward. until finally the argument announces that we now understand the origins of money. ludicrous analogies. empirical object with which we started the chapter? Or the immaterial transcendental essence to which we later moved? If we had found ourselves identifying with either of these forms of analysis. and sardonic asides strongly suggest that these passages are not meant to be taken literally. Both of these positions – and now we begin to get some small hint of what Marx is presenting – are associated here with political economy. The third section of Capital’s opening chapter presents us with an idealist dialectic: it identifies a series of ‘defects’ in categories derived from the commodity form. They do not reflect Marx’s own analyses. Sarcastic footnotes. Francis Wheen has memorably described this sec114
. but now that the dialectics has begun.Communization and its Discontents reference here is a crude sexual innuendo – Marx is impugning the analytical virility of the political economists by implying that they are unable to bed down their categories properly. according to the logic of this section. If so. This section is shot through with gestures that suggest that Marx is deeply amused by this presentation. the Dame Quickly joke breaks the spell.75 Read at face value. we should hold some severe reservations about Marx’s materialist bona fides. each defect drives toward a more adequate category. because without it the concept of the commodity would be defective. Marx now launches into a convoluted and implausible series of dialectical analyses of the commodity form. but analyses he has set out to criticize. the passage strongly implies that the logical deficiencies of a set of conceptual categories resolve themselves by compelling the manifestation of a real sociological phenomenon: money exists.

each of which operates as though decontextualized thought were sufficient to achieve sociological insight. the text has displayed a series of analyses of the wealth of capitalist society. Even for Marx. is made manifest by its equality with the coat. in Wheen’s words. Dominic LaCapra has argued that this section is best read as a series of dominant and counter-voices. The initial. analysis of the wealth of capitalist societies suggested
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. He does this in the form of a mischievous digression on Aristotle. empiricist. with the effect of undermining the reader’s identification with the overt argument: Bizarre footnotes on Benjamin Franklin and on the problem of human identity appear to cast an ironic light on the concept of abstract labor power as the essence or ‘quiddity’ of exchange values. (‘The fact that [linen] is [exchange] value. ‘a shaggy dog story’. This section of Capital also includes a moment where Marx finally breaks the fourth wall and provides some more explicit guidance on his own analytical approach.77 The sarcastic tone of much of the section operates to distance the reader from the dialectical analysis of the wealth of capitalist societies.Frames of Struggle tion as a ‘picaresque journey through the higher realms of nonsense’. until finally driven to realize that the whole presentation is. An ironic countervoice even surfaces in the principal text to strike dissonant notes with respect to the seemingly dominant positivistic voice. sarcasm eventually reaches its limits. however.78 Prior to this digression. in which the reader is confronted with increasingly surreal meditations on the interactions of the linen and the coat.’) The reader begins to wonder whether he should take the concepts of abstract labor power and exchange value altogether at face value. just as the sheep’s nature of a Christian is shown in his resemblance to the Lamb of God. differentiating this presentation from Marx’s own method of inquiry.76 More analytically.

was not intellect or brute logical force. these properties can be logically intuited by reason. in the form of commodity-values. because Greek society was founded on the labor of slaves. The second. he rejects it out of hand. hence had as its natural basis the inequality of men and of their labor-powers. understood as a straightforward given – as data. It was a particular kind of practical experience: Aristotle was unable to extract this fact. If the brute force of thought were all that were required to deduce value and to analyze its properties. then surely Aristotle would have been bright enough to deduce it. Fortunately. analysis suggested that empirical observation might not be enough: the commodity also possesses properties that are not immediately perceptible by the senses. all labor is expressed as equal human labor and therefore as labor of equal quality. The secret of the expression of value. dialectical. that.Communization and its Discontents that one had only to observe the self-evident properties of the commodity. could not be deciphered until
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. This presupposition is playfully destabilized when Marx suddenly asks why Aristotle was not able to deduce the existence of value. Nevertheless. But why? What Aristotle lacked. This seemingly innocent question carries devastating implications. namely the equality and equivalence of all kinds of labor because and in so far as they are human labor in general. transcendental. by inspection from the form of value. Marx goes on to argue. these approaches share the presupposition that the mind’s brute force can penetrate all obstacles to arrive at a clear sense of the wealth of capitalist societies. analysis suggested that commodities could not be understood in their static isolation – that a dynamic dialectical analysis is required to grasp how commodities develop in interaction with other commodities. For all their differences. Indeed Aristotle is bright enough – Marx helpfully points out – to consider the possibility that something like value might exist. The third.

recurrently putting on display competing forms of theory. If a specific kind of practical experience is required. or observations made. To the extent that a particular kind of theory remains unaware of its current sphere of social validity. Aristotle’s genius is displayed precisely by his discovery of a relation of equality in the value-expression of commodities. We have also been given our first clear hint about what is being presented here: competing forms of theory that fail to recognize their own entanglement in determinate sorts of practical experience.79 This explanation ricochets back on everything that came before. An adequate analysis would expose the relationship between practice and thought. in order for certain ‘logical’ conclusions to be drawn. Marx will develop these hints. Nothing that we have seen thus far in Capital’s opening chapter attempts this feat. We have instead been reading an exemplary presentation of several competing forms of analysis that Marx has caricatured in this chapter as the opening volley of his critique. Over the course of Capital. then the forms of analysis prominently displayed so far in this chapter have not grasped why they are able to arrive at the conclusions they do.Frames of Struggle the concept of human equality had already acquired the permanence of a fixed popular opinion. This however becomes possible only in a society where the commodity-form is the universal form of the product of labor. and thus over-extrapolates and hypostatizes a
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. Only the historical limitation inherent in the society in which he lived prevented him from finding out what ‘in reality’ this relation of equality consisted of. hence the dominant social relation is the relation between men as possessors of commodities. gradually connecting each one with the sort of practical experience that renders that theory socially valid – but only for a bounded slice of social experience. We have been given our first clear hint about Marx’s actual method of inquiry: that he seeks to explain the practical experiences that prime specific sorts of perception and cognition.

not simply the end result – the replication of a set of aggregate historical trends characteristic of capitalist production – but also the contradictory countercurrents that imply possibilities for the development of new forms of collective life. Post Festum Knowledge Why not declare that this is the intent? Why not explain the presentational strategy and state the actual analytical method overtly? In part. The breadth of his analysis is related to its critical power: by grasping the reproduction of capital as a much more internally diverse and multifaceted phenomenon than competing theories. then. He is positioned to grasp. is to demonstrate the partial and onesided character of competing theories of capitalist production. which render valid very different sorts of claims. By systematically cataloguing each aspect of the complex process by which capital is reproduced – by refusing to reductively equate capitalist production with a small set of aggregate results of this process as a whole – Marx seeks to bring the internal variability of capitalist production squarely into view. Marx
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. no doubt. he renders capitalist history citable in more of its moments. the explanation is that Marx did not anticipate how obscure his readers would find his presentational strategy. and then by panning back from those boundaries to show other dimensions of capitalist production. and mines a much wider array of social experience than do competing forms of theory. Marx gradually explores the internal variability of capitalist production. His analysis operates by demonstrating the narrow boundaries within which specific theoretical claims can be said to be valid.Communization and its Discontents narrow slice of social experience to the exclusion of others. that theory can be convicted for expressing a partial and one-sided conception of capitalist society. One of Marx’s goals. In this way.

however. he seems to have taken for granted that his readers would then understand that a burlesque style of presentation would be required to adequately express the absurdity of this system. hence also scientific analysis of those forms. More problematically. Marx attempted to write the text in a way that exemplified his own understanding of the interdependence of thought and everyday social practice. and explore how it can be appropriated. it represents an accidental historical insight that lies ready to hand due to the peculiar characteristics of capitalist production. The text embodies its own
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. as we are confronted with the consequences and implications of what we collectively do: Reflection on the forms of human life.Frames of Struggle viewed the discourse of political economy as self-evidently absurd – its categories as ‘deranged’ – and he expected his readers to share his sense that these categories could be socially valid only for an irrational form of production. In the fourth section of Capital’s opening chapter. in a passage that is seemingly specific to political economy’s discovery of the lawlike patterns generated by capitalist production. Marx describes how knowledge arises after the fact.80 This passage is neither an offhand description of the method of political economy. The text will first enact a phenomenon and then – sometimes many chapters later – Marx will make explicit what that phenomenon implied. as one of the cornerstones of Capital’s presentational strategy. this insight is available to be appropriated and redeployed in a new form – in this case. He did not foresee how many readers would approach the text ‘straight’. Consistently through the text. Marx will mobilize this post festum structure. and therefore with the results of the process of development already to hand. takes a course directly opposite to their real development. Reflection begins post festum. nor a general claim about human knowledge as such: instead. In part.81 Once constituted by this accident of history. however.

Marx attaches explicit identities to the original actors. in the process. not ‘elementary forms’ from which other aspects of capitalist society can be derived. Once we have acted.85 In each successive chapter. onto which he casts actors who represent common approaches to theorizing the wealth of capitalist societies.84 The ‘social forms’ introduced in the original play are gradually revealed to be. Marx thus treats Capital as a production – and flags this in the opening chapter by treating the main text as a stage. Marx makes explicit further implications of the practices and forms of theory articulated in previous chapters.
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. but rather aggregate results of a vast array of concrete practices that Marx systematically catalogues through the remainder of the volume. tease out their implications – and become able to re-enact and creatively adapt our insights to novel ends. Readers who do not recognize that this strategy is in play will commonly miss the strategic point of long passages of text – particularly early in the work. Only after actually staging this play does he then – in chapter 2 – explicitly tell his readers that his investigation proceeds by exploring a series of ‘characters who appear on the economic stage’. The empiricist figure who opens the chapter is associated with vulgar political economy. In much later chapters.Communization and its Discontents claim that first we act. then we appropriate insights from that enactment – and. innovating around and adapting the original performance.83 while the transcendental figure is associated with classical political economy. and little can be stated explicitly. blindly and without a clear sense of the full implications and consequences of our actions – generating possibilities in a state of distraction. we can transform our relationship to the original act. we can then reflect consciously on our actions.82 The explicit articulation takes place only after the practical enactment – first we act. when less has been enacted.

or even a collection of several dozen practices. in other words. sardonic critique of a set of blinkered economic theories and philosophies that mobilize only the smallest fraction of the insights that could be mined from the analysis of capitalist production. in other words. As it happens.Frames of Struggle Many important implications of the social practices that reproduce capital are simply not visible from the standpoint of a single practice. the qualities of Hegel’s Geist.88 This chapter presents. describing capital as a self-moving subject that is also substance – attributing to capital. This is the description of capital as it appears from the standpoint of circulation. capital appears to be a self-organizing. rather like it does to the political economists: as a spontaneously self-organizing system. in other words. Thus. unbounded and unrestrained. This exploration enables him to introduce the category – but only as it appears from the standpoint of those social practices associated with the circulation of goods on the market. but his mocking. autonomous entity. He deploys Hegelian vocabulary to draw out the idealist mystification of this perspective.86 Marx expects his readers to regard this image as self-evidently absurd but. Marx distances himself from this interpretation with a heavy dose of sarcasm. he has already explored dozens of different social practices. It does not outline Marx’s own conception of capital. he also compares this image of capital to the Christian Trinity87 and to the fairy tale of the goose that lays the golden eggs. and thus remain awestruck by a phenomenon they only dimly understand. unbounded by material constraints. just in case the reference is too obscure. when viewed from the standpoint of circulation. when Marx first introduces the category of capital in chapter 4. It appears. This is precisely why so many forms of theory derive such inadequate conceptions of capitalist production: they are focusing on too narrow a slice of social experience.
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. an infantile fantasy conception of capital as a sui generis phenomenon that spontaneously brings forth wealth from itself. for example.

Since text is necessarily linear. Until then. Marx’s conclusions can thus seem ungrounded and obscure – dogmatic assertions.Communization and its Discontents The phenomenon will appear very different once Marx can mobilize the insights available in other dimensions of social experience. By the time he can render the analysis explicit. and the world system. indicate what sort of analysis Marx is making – and explain how this analysis overcomes the subject/object divide in a very different way to that assumed by contemporary theories of social form. and not every practice can be explored simultaneously. or even edited out!. By the same token. instead of carefully substantiated arguments. however. by interpreters keen to zero in on what they take to be the heart of the argument. He will only explicitly articulate his own conclusions. long sections of text can appear not to make any substantive contributions to the overarching argument – and are thus often not discussed. the reader has often forgotten the many earlier passages in which he painstakingly assembled the diverse building blocks on which specific conclusions rely.
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. however. once he has explored all of the practical actions required to generate a particular social insight. Marx must move past the sphere of circulation – into analyses of the sphere of production. Microscopic Anatomy In this short piece I cannot adequately explore how this microscopic anatomy plays out. the state.89 But these long. sarcasm is his principal tool for flagging his personal distance from the perspectives explored in his main text. To articulate a more adequate understanding of capital. I can. detailed passages are where Marx carries out the heart of his analysis – where he outlines capital’s ‘microscopic anatomy’. the result is often that Marx must string together many chapters before he has assembled the insights needed to articulate important conclusions.

Marx starts to explore a series of micrological social practices. He begins with practices associated with a petty bourgeois experience of capitalist production – practices that could all conceivably be undertaken by persons who produce goods using their own personal labor. or from a customary process of the exchange of goods. He does this in excruciating detail. It generates real effects. bring these goods to market. Along the way. engaging in what Marx calls a process of ‘social metabolism’. This material result is a real aspect of contemporary capitalist production: we really do move goods from one place to another. which form part of the real internal variability of capitalist production. In this sense. and have argued that Marx intends to advocate for a form of collective life in which social wealth is based on material wealth.90 This real result. and exchange them for other goods that they personally need. we will arrive at a very partial and one-sided understanding of the process. to advocate alternative forms of collective life. These real effects suggest specific possibilities for future social development – including some possibilities that would carry social development in directions that are not compatible with the continued reproduction of capital. The same material result would arise from direct barter.Frames of Struggle In chapters 2 and 3 of Capital. rather than on value. these real effects enable practical experiences that can be mobilized critically.91 While this may indeed be an important potential. the material result cannot be disregarded. tells us nothing about the process through which the result has been achieved. If we focus entirely on the result. Marx highlights the material result of this process – the exchange of material good for material good. Some contemporary theorists have picked up on one possible emancipatory implication of this particular real effect. and with no explicit indication of what strategic purpose the analysis serves. Marx’s actual understanding of
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. however. At the same time.

intersubjective and objective elements of each
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. point out which competing forms of theory fixate on the dimension just analyzed. This basic process will continue through the whole length of Capital.92 By panning back in this way. Marx pans back to look at the same phenomenon from a broader perspective – that of the process by which this material result has been achieved. but what sorts of bodily comportments.Communization and its Discontents emancipatory possibilities is much more complex. But what does all this have to do with the subject/object
divide?
When carrying out his microscopic anatomy. The end result is a rich and complex network of emancipatory resources that Marx catalogues throughout his text. not just what sorts of impacts people create in the external world. ask what other social purposes could be pursued when deploying the same sorts of social actions. and other subjective states are part and parcel of a specific social performance. Marx will systematically catalogue dimensions of social experience. and then pan back to look at capitalist production from a different perspective. and to do so he seeks to capture. mining many different dimensions of the internal variability in the practices that reproduce capital. He is analyzing micrological social practices. Marx stages a series of miniature plays. Having explored the implications of the material result. He can also begin assembling the resources to make a prima facie case that capitalist production itself suggests the possibility for alternative means to achieve this same result – thus refuting charges that his critique is utopian or impractical given current levels of technological sophistication or complexity of the division of labor. Marx can criticize as one-sided and partial any forms of theory that over-extrapolate from this small aspect of capitalist production. or what sorts of interactions they carry out with other people. The narrative form of the play allows Marx to capture the subjective. strategic orientations. In each new section. forms of perception and thought.

for example. Instead. however. and different potentials for current and future social development. not because these forms all share the same fractal structure. and objective consequences – they generate different immediate consequences.Frames of Struggle social practice that he explores. but each also generating their own distinctive consequences and potentials when considered in isolation or when grouped
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. It enables Marx to map several different dimensions of social practices simultaneously. he ends up cataloguing dozens and dozens of differentiated types of performances. intersubjective relations. intersubjective relations. overlook contradictory social trends. thieves and heirs. intersubjective relations. theorists may conflate fundamentally different kinds of social performance. bankers and governments. or objective impacts enacted. and a wide cast of other characters who enact different sorts of performances facilitated by this same basic prop. Unless this diversity is recognized. and objective consequences are always part and parcel of any given social practice. each integral to the reproduction of capital. in a way that clearly demarcates and preserves social diversity. depending on the subjective orientations. For this reason. the common prop we call ‘money’ can be variously used by buyers and sellers. carried out with the same prop and on the same stage. debtors and creditors. These performances. Thus. It also allows him to thematize how what is superficially the ‘same’ act. and fail to grasp important potentials for alternative forms of collective life. but because determinate subjective stances. Marx does not end up pointing all social performances back to a small number of social forms that purportedly permeate social interaction. The theatrical narrative style of Marx’s work is designed to maximize his ability to keep track of the performative diversity that can differentiate superficially similar kinds of social practices. This approach allows Marx to relate social forms of subjectivity and objectivity to one another. constitute different sorts of subjective stances. might nevertheless be part of a very different performance.

Once enacted. they are appropriated – seized from the circumstances in which they originated. through some sort of abstract leap outside history. We enact many of these performances in a state of distraction. he can only change the form of the materials. Ostensibly speaking about ‘production’ in a narrow economic sense.’94 I suggest that Marx understands this principle also to apply to our production of human history. in the course of a performance that has very different overt goals. he can only proceed as nature does herself. as a ‘fixed popular opinion’93 – something we intuitively feel is correct. which may fly beneath the radar of ordinary awareness. emancipatory potentials are not created ex nihilo.e. i. in Marx’s words. because we enact a peculiar kind of equality accidentally. the spirit of the argument is Darwinian: although there is no telos driving historical
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.Communization and its Discontents together with a subset of the other practices required for capitalist production. while focusing on more overarching goals. And yet these fleeting practical experiences. human equality becomes a particularly important component of the reservoir of practical experience that can be wielded for emancipatory ends. Instead. and institutionalized anew. but whose origins we have difficulty tracing. Many of the performances Marx traces are fleeting and ephemeral moments embedded in longer chains of related practices. repurposed. The experience of human equality figures as one of these fleeting moments – contradicted by many more prominent aspects of social experience. Selective Inheritance How does all this relate to the question with which I opened – the question of how Marx understands the immanent generation of emancipatory potential? A seemingly throwaway line in Capital’s opening chapter provides an important hint. so that the conviction that humans are equal emerges initially. For Marx. nevertheless provide a reservoir of experience that can be mined and rendered explicit for emancipatory ends. Once again. however. Marx argues: ‘When man engages in production.

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. it is possible to mobilize this internal variability. it sees the reproduction of capital as dependent on a vast assemblage of social practices that possesses high internal variability. awe-inducing part. These patterns are part of the internal variability of capitalist production – a particularly striking and. Moreover. It is mediated by an opportunistic process of selective inheritance that draws upon the pre-existing variability present in the original society in adapting to a changing historical environment.Frames of Struggle development in a particular direction. Within this framework. for political economy at least. Marx’s microscopic anatomy serves two crucial purposes. First. Second. Communism would be capitalism. and which suggest alternative ways of institutionalizing the aspects of capitalist production we might want to preserve. later forms of social life are descended. chaotic content. It refuses to look through this complex. to reduce our social experience to the set of aggregate patterns that are captured by these social forms. in order to reductively grasp capitalism as a system defined only by the reproduction of a small set of social forms. which would creatively adapt existing social potentials to emancipatory ends. Capital’s critical standpoint relies on keeping firmly in view this vast reservoir of internal social variability. also generate effects at much more local scales. which requires for its generation the tandem operation of all of the social practices Marx catalogues in Capital. which do not require the continued operation of the system as a whole. Yet the same practices that operate together to generate such aggregate effects. the development of new forms of social life does not take place in a completely random way. it demonstrates how inadequate it would be. with modification. it shows how an extremely diverse array of micrological social practices could unintentionally generate the sorts of social forms described in Capital’s opening chapter – how order could arise without the need for a mystical designer. Instead. adaptively improvising new forms of collective life. some disassembly required: a speciation from our existing form of social life. from earlier forms. Through a process of selective inheritance.

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Work.95 The recent uptake of the post-autonomist immaterial labor thesis draws cultural practitioners closer to the critical self-recognition of their own labor (waged and otherwise) as alienated. and Therein See a Siege Anthony Iles and Marina Vishmidt
Art’s double character as both autonomous and fait social is incessantly reproduced on the level of its autonomy. but that is not its primary function. Art finds itself in a new relation with contemporary forms of value production. Theodor Adorno If you take hold of a samovar by its stubby legs. This applies also to the structural re-composition of work in the image of the ‘creative’ and self-propelled exploitation
. Work Your Thoughts. Viktor Shklovsky
Introduction Recent moves in political aesthetics have posited a communist moment in so-called ‘relational art’ through which experiments in collectivity and conviviality outline a potential post-capitalist praxis to come. as well its formal commonality with other kinds of affective labor at large. you can use it to pound nails.

Value. with its twin poles of use-value and exchange-value. at this historical juncture. it can be argued that the spread of market relations in China and Southeast Asia is eclipsed by the global growth of populations that are surplus to the requirements of accumulation. Communization would
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. Thus.Communization and its Discontents typical of financialized capitalism. as art expands to include more and more fields of social action within its imaginative and institutional remit (political activity. In an unprecedented way. shading into forces of ‘non-production’ and devalorization in an era of debt-financed austerity. on the other. work. Communization Central to communization theory is the premise that the chief product of the capitalist mode of production is the class relation between capital and labor. However. examining points of convergence and divergence with the communization thesis. art’s estrangement from labor continues apace. In this text. art not only reflects but revises the productive forces. the paradox remains that the social effectiveness of art is guaranteed by its separation from capitalist work. coincides with labor’s estrangement from labor: laboring subjects who do not identify with themselves as labor. but. but was historically at the core of its defeat. At the same time.96 Observing capital’s victories through thirty years of neoliberal restructuring. On the one hand all labor becomes in some sense aesthetic self-creation. formerly unalienated activities are subsumed by capitalist social relations as never before. we will discuss the complex through which art and culture register and inscribe social relations of production as they develop from the struggles between capital and labor. communization theory contends that the self-affirmation of the working class is not only defunct as a political strategy. is the real abstraction that mediates all social relations through the commodity. This social relation is evidently breaking down in the West as de-valorization and debt replaces expansion in financialized economies. This stemmed from a failure to attack the category of value. education).

. they can provide neither perspective nor legitimacy to current struggles. in some ways evokes an aesthetic rather than a political view of the content of revolution. The affirmation of direct social relations unmediated by the alienating abstractions of money.99 Class and labor are experienced as an ‘external constraint’. communization poses the question of why and how communism is possible now when the class relation which reproduces capital is breaking down. The development of capital progressively empties work of content as it strives toward real subsumption. of determinate negation of what is.. […] was either a question of workers seizing the productive apparatus from this parasitic class and of destroying its State in order to rebuild another.97 Revolution previously. The idea of an immediate appropriation of the world. from Schiller onwards. through the organ of the trade unions or councils. described by Théorie Communiste (TC) as ‘programmatism’. and then abandons us here. or else of undermining the power of the bourgeois State by organising production themselves from the bottom up. collective self-determination as a work of art. led by the party as the bearer of consciousness. capitalist production itself appears increasingly superfluous to the proletariat: it is that which makes us proletarians.’100 It is possible to draw a link between the critique of labor as a ground for human emancipation (communism) in the communization account and the critique of labor found in critical aesthetics.Frames of Struggle be the realisation of the human community through the destruction of the value-form. not a mere takeover of existing means of production.98 By contrast to this tradition. Endnotes discuss the redundancy of the wage in today’s capitalism: ‘As the wage form loses its centrality in mediating social reproduction. state or labor is an
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. which proposes a genuinely human community bonded together by play rather than production. But there was never a question or an attempt of abolishing the law of value. which encounter them as a limit.

which argues that it is precisely the other way around – art must maintain its difference from capitalist life in order to exert a critical purchase on it. between art and work. comes from the tradition of critical Marxist aesthetics. The project of the dissolution of art into life – expressed variously in surrealism. are we any longer in a position to distinguish the capitalist forms from the unadulterated contents. art and commodity art. The Utopia of Exact Living Our departure point is that there is both an analogy and a disjunction between the premise of ultra-left communism. The analogy is that communism argues for the generalization of creativity through the overcoming of the social domination of abstract labor and the value-form. on the other hand. Dadaism. which also means the dissolution of the boundary between a reified creativity and a rarefied uselessness – art – and the production of use-values – work. and the premise of many radical art practices. Thus. It is the degree to which the separation between art and life. we can begin to see an aesthetic dimension to communization. i. Would art disappear in communism or would everything become art? The same question can be asked about work – would communism entail a generalization or the abolition of work? After 500 years of capitalism. the situationists. The disjunction.e. work and capitalist work. futurism.Communization and its Discontents invariant across Romantic aesthetics and is reflected in utopian socialist theory preceding Marx’s work. specifically communization. Fundamentally. productivism. they are premised upon different ideas of art’s role in capitalist subsumption. is viewed as a problem which can be overcome in the here and now or the symptom of a problem which only social revolution can address that marks the difference between these two traditions. conceptual and performance art – has drawn life into art’s orbit but also bound art closely to the potential transformation of general social life. constructivism. life and capitalist life?
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to ‘look’ more proletarian. and lastly the artist as a catalyst or spiritual engineer seeking ‘to transform the consciousness of production itself in order to contribute to labor’s emancipation’.101 The debates between constructivist and productivist tendencies within INKhUK (the Soviet ‘Institute of Artistic Culture’. Maria Gough’s research on the factory placement of constructivist Karl Ioganson shows that interventions by constructivist artists in industrial production did in fact take place during the NEP. Yet. The irony is that if artists had completely dissolved themselves into the figure of the worker we would know no more of them. just as communist intellectuals in Weimar Germany competed. this narrative. of a true avant-garde defeated by Stalinism and the NEP (New Economic Policy). The early 20th century avantgarde saw many such attempts.Frames of Struggle Artists on the Assembly Line If art’s emancipatory qualities are founded upon the tensions between selfdirected activity and productive labor then attempts to close the distance between them are of paramount importance. The artist going into industry has always had an element of dressing up. From these. The most radical Soviet constructivist and productivist artists appear to be participating in a dress rehearsal for a putative revolutionary role curtailed by Stalinism. the artist as designer establishing new product lines. has been transformed in recent years. With the adoption of rationalising Taylorism as Bolshevik policy in the rapid industrialisation during NEP. 1920-26) about how to close the gap between productive and aesthetic labor are also instructive.102 The practical experiments in the production process by constructivist artists fulfilled only the first and second of these roles. Rodchenko dressed in a ‘production suit’ continues to haunt left historians and artists. John Roberts isolates three potential roles for the artist intervening directly in the production process: the artist as an engineer contributing to the improvement of industrial technique. both in their lives and their works. but
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. Soviet production did not depart from.

Effectively artists worked to discipline and police workers in the work place and outside it.Communization and its Discontents rather aped value-production (albeit in a dysfunctional form). His theoretical output attempts to close the distinction between production and consumption enforced by capital and reproduced intact in most Marxist theory. this is because until now Marxists have known only the bourgeois world of things. Notwithstanding a technocratic outlook and a problematic affirmation of labor (albeit labor redefined under socialist conditions). Progress was regression. His prefiguration of a ‘communist object’ and new materialist social relations sits uneasily with art and labor’s instrumentalization under Bolshevism. Arvatov’s ideas hold out significant opportunity for development. if for Roberts the third position remains a utopian horizon then this leads to many questions. or has been only partially understood as a relation to the means of production. Arvatov foregrounds the status of things as central to the communist transformation of everyday life: ‘If the significance of the human relation to the Thing has not been understood. Yet. is this ‘emancipation’ from labor or as labor? A proponent of ‘left’ productivism.’103 Arvatov insists that the polarities which organize bourgeois life would be completely dissolved under communist social relations. more importantly. what makes the artist the catalyst in transforming the production process? And. In a collaboration between artists and workers. made a contribution to this debate which was overlooked at the time and only recently recovered. Freed from possession as private property. things are also freed from the subjectobject relations through which capitalism subordinates human life to the demands of the production process and thus capital’s own valorization process. He allows us to jettison the crude Marxian idea that science and technology are neutral means to be appropriated by the proletariat and enables us to pose the problem of
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. Arvatov hardly mentions art in this important essay. Boris Arvatov. but remains primarily a theorist of the artistic trends associated with constructivism.

Frames of Struggle communism as not only a change in ownership, but a total departure from the capitalist mode of production and its ‘scientific’ foundation. A transformation of ontological oppositions: production and consumption, everyday life and labor, subject and object, active and passive, exchange-value and use-value. Drawing upon the insights of Walter Benjamin on collecting, we can speculate that it is only things liberated from use which cease to be commodities. The socialist object is not just one that’s been taken out of commodity exchange and put to good use in a new society; if it was really socialist, it would never be put to use as we know it.104 The Communist Imaginary In his writing on relational aesthetics and socially-engaged art practices John Roberts notes a disconnect between such practices and a critique of work.105 Roberts sees in this activity a valuable ‘holding operation’ which ‘keeps open the ideal horizon of egalitarianism, equality and free exchange.’ Stewart Martin disagrees: ‘The dissolution of art into life not only presents new content for commodification, but a new form of it in so far as art or culture has become a key medium through which commodification has been extended to what previously seemed beyond the economy’.106 Recent accounts of the relation between productive labor and artistic labor refer to post-autonomist ideas of the socialisation of work in advanced capitalism. Central to these accounts is Maurizio Lazzarato’s concept of ‘immaterial labor’ – the notion that all work is becoming increasingly technologized, dependent upon and productive of communication and cooperation rather than a finished product. However, almost immediately abandoned the term: after its formulation Lazzarato

But the concept of immaterial labor was filled with ambiguities. Shortly after writing those articles I decided to abandon the idea and haven’t used it since. One of the ambiguities it created had to
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Communization and its Discontents do with the concept of immateriality. Distinguishing between the material and the immaterial was a theoretical complication we were never able to resolve.107 In the early 21st century claims for the hegemony of a class of immaterial laborers could be disputed by pointing out the drive of capital towards absolute surplus-value extraction in the global south. After the 2008 financial crisis, the dramatic shake out of overinflated values and optimism about the agency of this new class brought to new light the relation between the material and the immaterial. Furthermore viewing contemporary labor through the lens of immaterial labor tended to reproduce rather than disassemble the dominant division of mental and manual labor in capitalism. Art as such can be seen as the fetishization of the division of mental and manual labor, which is refined and generalised in the ‘creativization’ of ‘post-Fordist’ work. An interesting way out of the sterility of such debates, is identified by Stewart Martin in his essay ‘The Pedagogy of Human Capital’, in which he discusses how terminology such as immaterial labor and selfvalorization both operate with a problematic concept of autonomy. Autonomy can be said to have been thoroughly internalised by capital in its attempts to collapse the subjectivity of living labor as its own and through its moves to commodify previously non-capitalised areas of life. The move to aesthetics is then seen as a way of dissolving the autonomy/heteronomy distinction, reliant ultimately on domination (even and especially when it’s the ‘self-legislating’ kind), through the agency of play and the invention of ‘forms-of-life’ resistant to an autonomy thinkable only through capital’s laws.108 What is There in Uselessness to Cause You Distress? In art from the 1960s onwards late capitalist modernity offered some exits for practitioners who saw the division of labor between art work and
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Frames of Struggle regular work as a political issue. There was a ‘refusal of work’ within art, rejecting art making and socialisation as an artist by exiting the art world and becoming invisible or imperceptible on its terms. There was also the emulation of work in the art domain, from proletarian stylistics to managerial protocols, marking the shift to the ‘post-industrial’ era in the West. Feminism’s influence was seen in practices which problematized the division of art work from domestic labor. Conceptual art itself was premised on an expansion of art’s competence via the dissolution of its borders. The paradoxical identification with extra-artistic labor while rejecting artistic labor entered another phase with artists such as Gustav Metzger (leader of an art strike and proponent of auto-destructive art) and the Artist Placement Group. The Artist Placement Group, operating in the UK and Europe from 1966–1989, was started by John Latham, Barbara Steveni and others. Their central concept was ‘placing’ artists in organizations, a forerunner to artist residencies. The main differences with the artist residency as it exists now was that the artist was re-defined as an Incidental Person, a kind of disinterested and de-specialised agent who might prompt a shift in the context into which he or she was inserted, promising no specific outcome beyond that. The maneuvers of repudiation of art, whether it was negative, e.g. withdrawal from art, or positive, e.g. expansion of art’s remit, were subjected to a ‘knight’s move’ by APG, whose idea of the Incidental Person (IP) managed to at once de-value art and de-value work. It bracketed both ‘art’ and ‘work’ in the emergent concept of the ‘professional’ as a neutral and unmarked social being. It also re-constituted artistic subjectivity at what can be viewed as a higher level of mystification: a valorization of the artist as the place holder for human freedom elsewhere cancelled in capitalist society. This conception is linked to the Romantic aesthetic tradition, and can be found across 19th century philosophers such as Friedrich Schiller and William Hazlitt, as well as authors working in the Marxist critical aesthetics vein, such as Theodor Adorno, pointing to their shared reference to art as unalienated labor.
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Communization and its Discontents To give a specifically Marxist valence to the idea of an artistic avant-garde, in her book Marx’s Lost Aesthetic, Margaret A. Rose speculates that Marx not only developed a Saint-Simonian critique of the feudal nature of industrial capitalism but was also influenced by the Comte de Saint-Simon’s ideas about artists in society: ‘Artists should also be considered as industrialists, as they are producers in many respects and among them they contribute greatly to the prosperity of our manufacturers by the designs and models with which they furnish the artisans.’109 In his utopian plan for a future society based upon transformed industrial relations SaintSimon made room for artists in his ‘“Chambre d’Invention” at the head of his administrative pyramid with engineers and architects.’110 As Rose points out, since for Saint-Simon politics was a ‘science of production’, the role of artists was itself a political role, bound up with the multivalent aspects of art, use and poiesis.111 Here we can see prefigured the deployment of artists in industry as promoted and practised by APG. The significance of this precursor is not only that from a certain perspective APG reproduce the role of the artist as part of a problematic managerial vanguard of a new system. Saint-Simon’s ‘prosperity’ is not productive in the capitalist sense but emancipates workers from work to pursue ‘enjoyments’. It is this which connects APG back to Marx’s ‘lost aesthetic’ and prompts us to reassess their efforts in line with a critique of the organization of activity and of the senses under the capitalist mode of production. Traditionally, capitalist modernity excluded art from instrumentality because it was seen as an exception, a free creative practice which was pursued for ends different to economic activity, and untainted by politics. But this can also be re-framed as placing art in service of a ‘higher’ instrumentality, that of displacing and reconciling bourgeois contradictions.112 The Adornian complex of art as the absolute commodity captures this. The concept of the IP then could be read as a subversive affirmation of this: putting purposeless purpose to work.
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Frames of Struggle Whereas APG’s placements were guided by a characteristically obtuse notion of ‘use’, artists are inserted into social contexts now precisely because they are deemed useful for executing vague state or corporate goals. Such an outcome is already evident in the history of APG trying to ‘sell situations’ to UK culture bureaucracies in the 1970s, as they alternately embrace and back off from the entrepreneurial and employment potential occasionally glimpsed by the Arts Council in the ‘placements’. APG asserted the aim to ‘provide a service to Art, not a service to artists’, while the notion of the IP is predicated on a loss of self-evidence of what Art is or even its right to exist, as Adorno put it. The opacity of any benefit in the presence of the IP in organizations is framed by APG as economically productive in the visionary sense today’s business climate needs. By the early 1980s, the concept of ‘human capital’ had begun to circulate in policy circles, and APG’s proposals started to make more sense. The presence of the IP in an organization was meant to overcome the antagonism between workers and management, much as the idea of human capital does. It was a process of making real oppositions ideally obsolete through the mediation of this ‘third term’. APG’s ‘non-technical non-solution’ thus exposed them to accusations of having social-democratic illusions. A few implications arise here. One is the IP’s repudiation of the productivist legacy of sending artists into the factories and improving the labor process: the IP brief was totally undetermined – APG took artistic alienation from productive life seriously. For the APG, however, if art did have a social use, it was not a use recognisable to anyone, but it did have the power to reveal the contingency of social uses, and propose other ones, albeit within the broadly-defined language game of art. Yet this challenge to use-value and useful labor was beholden to a vision of artistic neutrality which can be seen as readily morphing into the non-specialised but omniadaptable ‘creative’ of today. A powerful retort to APG’s attempts to expose commodity production to transformative non-instrumental ends can be derived from the
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makes several statements which clarify what is elsewhere an ambiguous relationship between exchange-value and usevalue. in his Appendix to the 1st German edition of Capital. Volume 1. ‘The Value-Form’. Yet.Communization and its Discontents case of one of the companies they targeted for placements: Lucas Aerospace. The ‘creativity’ of labor was matched by. the Committee rejected in practice the division of manual and intellectual work. Setting out to address ‘the exponential change in the organic composition of capital and the resultant growth of massive structural unemployment’ directly. the negativity of labor – stopping or slowing-down production. Something about between nothing and money The conception of use-value as separable from the commodity is questionable in itself. and in fact conditioned by. The plan proposed the reorganization of the company around ‘socially useful products and human-centered technologies’ developed by the workers themselves. this separation is also primary to the debate about whether art does or does not have use-value. Yet this approach strategically included both a rejection of and a compromise with the market. Karl Marx. While APG were unsuccessfully approaching management at the company.113 The plan was developed on company time and in the context of sit-ins and demonstrations to contest restructuring. It is important here to note that by no means was the Lucas Corporate Plan simply an experiment in self-management. the Lucas Aerospace Combine Shop Steward’s Committee was countering management-imposed restructuring with their own alternative corporate plan. as much as for debates about the content of communism.
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. The answer to this is decisive for art’s critical status in capitalism. The plan posed the problem of the emancipation of labor as a struggle over the content of work and the use-values it produces.

Frames of Struggle
The analysis of the commodity has shown that it is something twofold. we can say that use-value is always mediated by those social relations: ‘Use-value is the immediate physical entity in which a definite economic relationship – exchange-value – is expressed’. individual). not exchange. it must possess a twofold form. Use-values are realised only in consumption. The fact that (most) art is not produced directly under the law of value does not put it outside the value-form.
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.115 Marx discusses use-values always and already in the context of the commodity. As such.114 Therefore. it might perhaps be more relevant to discuss art in its tenuous link to abstract social labor than simply as anomalous to use-value. A commodity is the crystallisation of social labor. which is performed in a certain configuration of social relations of production. it is the division of commodities into a use-value and an exchange-value that bespeaks the operation of the social form of value. the form of a usevalue and the form of value … Relative value-form and equivalent form are moments of the same expression of value. Use-value refers to the natural properties of a commodity. which belong to one another and are reciprocally conditioning and inseparable. Therefore. Hence in order for a thing to possess commodity-form. but subsumed into the general form of value which hollows out particularity.116 While it is accurate to say that use-value exists outside its particular social form. the dimension of use-value supposedly unrelated to social form is subsumed in this homogeneity and abstraction insofar as use-value is part of the commodity. ‘use-value and exchange-value. are distributed in a polar manner among the commodities’. it is its opposite (particular. use-value and value. Use-value bears the same relation to exchange-value as concrete labor does to abstract labor. Because all capitalist commodities are products of abstract labor.

To develop production without productivity is
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. and ultimately testifies that the art into life versus critical autonomy paradox for art cannot be resolved so long as the social form of its production is determined by value. The principle of ‘production’ without productivity is that people’s activity and their relationship come first and output second. that is to say. has become possible only as a result of labor itself. of course. unhuman. yet these insights suggest that destruction of the capital-labor relationship must also destroy use-value as a constitutive category presupposed by value. or productivity. labor cannot serve as a ground for emancipation. Until recently.118 This political point is central. Hence the abolition of private property will become a reality only when it is conceived as the abolition of ‘labor’ (an abolition which. or even the ahistorical ‘metabolic interaction with nature’: ‘Labor’ by its very nature is unfree.Communization and its Discontents Moishe Postone identifies ‘labor’ as a capitalist category and thus a reified one. which is where Postone crosses over with communization theory in their shared emphasis on value-critique.117 This is relevant also to the de-socialised or idealised positioning of use-value. communist thought posed the problem of production as one of separating use-value from exchange-value. The questions raised by the Lucas Plan are revisited by Bruno Astarian with regard to what he calls ‘crisis activity’: The question is how production can resume without work. i. The form of social labor in capitalism is nowhere the same thing as concrete labor.e. unsocial activity. has become possible as a result of the material activity of society and which should on no account be conceived as the replacement of one category by another). determined by private property and creating private property. or exchange.

the drives towards abstraction
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. literature and language. of art. and therefore abstract. Jean-Joseph Goux relates Marx’s schema of the development of a general equivalent to the invention of forms of representation. need (a market as such) and offers production to satisfy it.119 Seen in this light.Frames of Struggle to abolish value in both its forms. He embodies the social forces of production without necessarily being bound by the censorship dictated by the relations of production. of the money-form. or further abstraction. Particularity and rejection of measurement evokes the aesthetic. here envisioned as not just in reaction to but exceeding the abstraction and value-measure which have prepared the ground for it. 1929 and 1971). rather than each producer cooperating to immediately satisfy particular needs. Theodor Adorno conceives of ‘aesthetic forces of production’ that inescapably imprint the artwork: ‘the artist works as social agent. Financialization: Form Follows Finance We can outline other relationships that bind artworks to the political economy of their times.’120 Those relations are legible in art. Put crudely. Each crisis marks a limit to the existing system’s ability to represent real world goods through money. the Lucas Plan enacts the isolation of a general. and in each case resolution of the crisis is by way of an expansion. Goux describes capitalist exchange’s tendency towards abstraction and the tendency to ‘dematerialisation’ in art as two sides of a general crisis of representation punctuated by historically locatable crises in the value form (1919.121 This system presents modes of signification and modes of exchange as imbricated. Astarian invokes communization as a form of production inseparable from the particular needs of individuals and in total rejection of measurement and accounting. but encrypted in such a way as to underline their contingency. indifferent to society’s own consciousness.

appearing as money making money on financial markets.. As gold became paper and then electronic. In this sense. Both speculative commodities.. Another was the move towards information systems and new technologies. art is backed by the credibility of the artist and money by the credibility of the state.’122 Arguably in the movement towards financialization art has tracked capital’s proclivity to escape from engagement with labor and into the self-reflexive abstraction of value. ‘Great 20th-century avant-garde art – and poetry in particular – from Celan to Brecht and Montale. the strain of this relationship has also ushered in forms of
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. This period saw a re-engagement with industrial materials and (vacant) industrial spaces by artists. has demonstrated the crisis of experiential units of measure. Art as a special commodity rebels against its commodity status. Art operates in these conditions but also upon them to transform their terms. Similarly in art. disproportion […] is where [avant-garde art] edges up to communism.. dissolves all prior values and relationships into abstract wealth.Communization and its Discontents in both art and money are entwined. seeking a transvaluation of all values. If this complicity between money and art has led to unseemly games with both. its antagonist – eschewing equivalence and disrupting orders of measure. money increasingly became autonomous from productive labor. One notable aspect of dematerialisation in art is its temporal coincidence with deindustrialisation in the late 60s and early 70s. The movement of self-expanding value. at times. This emphasis on immoderation. the conditions set by the movements of finance provide the material and conceptual parameters for art. expansion of its claims upon material previously alien to it tends towards the hollowing out of this material’s substance. Art is both an innovator in the forms of representation – extending the limit of what can be represented – and. rather than beyond. its tensions. Yet art is engaged in an endless testing of its own condition which anticipates negations of the determinations of the value form from inside.

emerge as a hated situation enforced by capital which has nothing to do with emancipation. the Labor of the Negative Increasingly. from capitalists and the State. tension with commodification gravitates towards uselessness and negation. If. in art we find the outline of an emancipatory practice to come then it is important to bear in mind that this remains a model and not a programme. it may be said that communization theory. but also education – testify to its current problems of valorization. This accords with the communization position – labor. in work and in radical politics. it is ‘a model of emancipated labor. Libidinal Economy (1974) several years later. whilst capital (at least in the West) appears to be going through an anti-productivist. It’s Not Worth it. Capital’s attempts to bind more closely to the market sectors not previously organized according to the law of value – art. The integration of expanses of social experience which used to provide capital with a dialectical contrast and a ‘standing reserve’ makes itself felt as uselessness and negation in art. It may be ventured that a common tendency of all progressive social movements at the time Goux was writing (1969) was a rejection of labor. Mate. It’s Only Art. artistic labor apes service work in its performance of affect and civic virtue. Lyotard was writing his famous ‘evil’ book. Bruno Astarian or Endnotes.123 Throughout art’s development in the face of advanced capitalism. not the model through which the emancipation of labor will be accomplished’. and its class politics. if not outright destructive turn. even in the labor movements.124 Don’t Worry. revisits the dialectic between reform or revolution which
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.Frames of Struggle critical reflexivity. or. as seen in the texts we have examined by TC. which fought hard to wrench more money and more life. not more work. which are affecting the relationship of capital and labor as well as that between art and labor. arguing that alienated labor is a source of self-destructive jouissance and can never be affirmed as a productive praxis once freed of its value-form integuments. Given the preceding.

‘Nowadays artistic labor is turning into wage labor while the problem is. The necessity of doing otherwise now stems largely from capital’s initiative: not only work. and can only model liberated human activity for free.E. This struggle over the wage and struggle against waged work has not been entirely alien to artists who have agitated around the issue of artists’ fees.G. The ongoing reproduction of the social relations of capital. with the politics of its class relations shattered.A. have been made so degraded and irrelevant that no one identifies with them anymore. how to liberate human activity in general from the form of wage labor. and is thus useless labor. The barrier to this provocation. However. this dis-identification. is. (Working Artists in the General Economy) demand reimbursement for ‘critical value’ in ‘capitalist value’. This problem whether applied to labor or a temporality which
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. At the same time. Groups such as W. This is certainly a materialist critique of the non-reproduction artists are tasked with advancing for everyone – at least they should be paid for it. as they were content to affirm the working class as it is in capital. means that competitive individualism becomes the only credible form of human autonomy – and the community of capital the only credible form of the human community. art. but working-class politics. but at the level of labor. appears as labor which cannot find value on the market. This shows that art has a problematic relationship to the commodity not only at the level of the artwork. it transposes that dialectic onto the ‘revolution’ side to put forward the claim that all previous revolutionary movements were reformist. that is. as Paolo Virno puts it. could also be seen as an atomising and decomposing one.Communization and its Discontents transfixed the Left in previous eras both as troubled and as seemingly quiescent as this one. in its post-object phase. This situation registered quite early in the stronghold of competitive creative individualism that can be said to have prototyped it.’125 This question of liberating human activity is bracketed in the question of artistic labor. which is also implicit to it. regardless of the new political articulations that come in its wake. of course. which.

number of people. imprinted by commodity relations). and the solution is to reject productivism. the proletariat’s needs are immense. It is a form of socialization of people which entails production. especially the Soviet
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. Presently. but without measuring time or anything else (inputs.Frames of Struggle ultimately comes down to labor-time under the form of value. Art stands between a conscious process and an unconscious one. closely tied to the development of individuality and difference. activity which dismantles ‘the subject as congealed technology’. and the pathos. ‘production’ without productivity is not a production function.127 Viewed thus communization would be a generalization of art and individuality different to that which we live through today. as writers like Bruno Astarian show: There is a paradox here: the economic crisis is at its deepest. Not only do artworks pass through a moment which bypasses use value. the criticality of art lay in the paradox of autonomy: art was autonomous (free. giving itself its own law) at the same time as it was heteronomous (unfree.126 There is a strong temptation to make an analogy between Astarian’s ‘production without productivity’ or ‘consumption without necessity’ and art’s output of ‘a product identical with something not produced’.
Conclusion Marx’s ambiguity on use-value can be linked to the ambivalence of the historical artistic avant-garde and left-communism in relation to work. Indeed. they also connect with a form of activity which presages non-objective relations between subjects. of current art practice. is not neglected in communization theory. For Adorno. and cannot be subsumed under exchange value. we can re-frame this as the tension between a readily-exploited ‘creativity’ and a withdrawing ‘negativity’ as the poles. output). The problem of the historic avant-garde.

anti-politics. whether as civic model or as exception that proves the law of capitalist social relations. and it has less relation to the negativity of labor-power than to the negativity of the ever-mutating form of value. is also the problem of communism – does work need to be valorized or negated. It is the apotheosis of the romantic figure of the artist: ‘Art is now the absolute freedom that seeks its end and its foundation in itself. The figure of the Incidental Person denotes a transformation common to both art and labor as social forms. Art’s relation to the value-form and role in socialising value-relations emerges in the forming of a speculative subjectivity suited to a speculative economy. work becomes a form lacking identity or outcome. and under what conditions? There has been an ongoing dialectic of art into life versus art against capitalist life. and does not need.
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.Communization and its Discontents example of Productivism. the link from art to finance – to self-expanding value. It seems there is a convergence between a certain sort of negationist attitude toward production in art and in certain strands of Marxism. key to Western liberal discourse since the Enlightenment. a process as self-referential and totalising as the expanded field of art. futility? Or even a dynamic counter-form – rupture – to the stagnant value-form? To avoid such an easy totalization. because it can only measure itself against the vertigo caused by its own abyss. But should the negativity of capitalist value be recognized as well as the negativity of labor-power lest we reify negativity as the simple absence of productivity. any content. to recursivity and abstraction – has to be maintained. substantially. this may be read instead as an index of the real subsumption of generic human capacities into the self-valorization process of a capital which is no longer sure about where value comes from or how to capture it. As the artist becomes a template for a generic subjectivity adaptable to all forms of authority and abstraction.’128 This is the generic subjectivity of the artist. Contra to the thesis that the dissolution of the borders between art and productive labor (or art and politics) heralds emancipation.

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are always double.129 Rather than an impediment confronting capital from the outside. ‘Every limit appears as a barrier to be overcome’: capital is a social dynamic which transforms its constitutive bounds into material contradictions. equally drives over and beyond every barrier. always both constrictive and generative. limit: barrier. these limits are capital. capital is ‘the living contradiction’ because it ‘both posits a barrier specific to itself. Marx distinguishes between these two types of barriers – the one posited. in Marx’s characterisation. From the perspective of capital.’130 Elsewhere. bridle: spur The limits to capital. ‘bridle’ and ‘spur’. and on the other side. the better to surpass them. fetters. capital posits labor as the source of all value and attempts to absorb as much of it
. border) for the first and schranke (barrier. obstacle. At root. are constitutive of capital. and the one driven over – by using grenze (limit. constraint) for the second. this ‘living contradiction’ refers to the self-undermining character of the capitalist mode of production: on the one hand. its limits into obstacles.The Double Barricade and the Glass Floor Jasper Bernes
1. boundary.

’ Every affirmation of the class of labor becomes. The statist regulations of the mid-20th century. Though as yet little known.’131 In recent struggles (basically since the mid-1990s) TC note the emergence of new forms of struggle in which ‘class belonging [is] an external constraint. as happened in the long period of restructuring beginning in the 1970s. as there is no longer an independent ‘workers’ identity. however. in this view. This is capitalism’s primary absurdity and irrationality. For TC. are not so much an external fetters upon accumulation as they are its generative conditions. economic stagnation or outright crisis. an affirmation of capital: ‘in each of its struggles. function as both a limit on profitability and a means by which capitalist society maintains the consumer purchasing power necessary for the reproduction of profits. The self-abolition of the proletariat is now possible because ‘being a class becomes the obstacle which its struggle as a class has to overcome. operating in other areas as well. the proletariat sees how its existence as a class is objectified in the reproduction of capital as something foreign to it. Eventually. falling wages.’132 It is no longer possible to propose a politics based upon the affirmation of working-class autonomy. since it means that increases in social wealth and productivity tend to appear as unemployment. Labor unions. the proletariat now finds itself confronted with a paradoxical condition where ‘acting as a class has become the very limit of class action. it employs labor-saving technologies which expunge living labor from production. limit and barrier.Communization and its Discontents as possible. on the other hand. examining it not only as axiomatic for capital but as the defining condition of the contemporary proletariat. the writers of Théorie Communiste (TC) have produced some of the most poignant writing on the two-fold character of the limit.’133 This is a limit in the double sense above – a fetter on revolutionary action. but also a generative condition which produces the possibility of superseding the capital-labor relationship. But we can also observe the dialectic of bridle and spur. they do become a fetter and must be destroyed.’134
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. by necessity. to take one example.

in part. emerges in their essay on the Greek uprising of 2008. in Greece such a suspension took place as a matter of necessity. attacked it and rendered it visible as an exterior constraint. But it carries with it a limit in the sense of constraint. it simply does not want to be what it is anymore. In the riots in Greece.137 The limit. the French post-ultra-left) defined by equally specific questions and debates. The Glass Floor (Le plancher de verre).’ What we note in Greece is the instantiation of a swerve or gap (écart) within the limit: To act as a class entails a swerve towards oneself [agir en tant que classe comporte un écart par rapport à soi]. is a positive (or generative) one: it promises the possibility of proletarian self-abolition. and abandoned with voluntarism all of the sterile claims for ‘another world. glass floor: shattered glass TC present these ideas in a highly difficult form. where the eponymous metaphor of the glass floor serves as a figural elaboration of the limit. from their placement within a highly specific theoretical milieu (broadly.135 One of the clearest accounts of this dialectic of limits. rather than will. it does so in a manner that stands outside the site
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. the proletariat does not demand anything and does not consider itself against capital as the basis for an alternative. in this sense. and their tracts are written in a dense theoretical shorthand whose esotericism arises.Strategies of Struggle 2. The Greek events are ‘a theoretical and chronological landmark’ because in them a minority fraction of the proletariat put its own class identity into question. which TC describe as involving a merely voluntaristic or willed suspension of class identity. to the extent that this action entails its own putting into question in relation to itself: the proletariat’s negation of its existence as class within its action as class. Though the Greek uprising marks the advent of a superseded class belonging.136 But unlike the moment of the anti-globalization movements and its anonymizing black blocs.’ all sense of the possibility of constructing an ‘alternative. however. a barrier.

on the market and the commodity (looting and burning of luxury shops). They originate ultimately in the restructuring of the capital-labor relationship. social welfare offices). between the day of exploitation and the night of revolts.Communization and its Discontents of production. crisis: swerve Such limits have nothing to do with a failure of will. here. But the point of encounter between capital and labor in the workplace remains quiet: ‘By their own practice.140 The producer-consumer submits to new (and newly repressive) disciplines in the advanced capitalist
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. nor even less with the collapse of various attempts at left-wing hegemony. Fractions of the working class proper confront capital as circulation or reproduction. appears in diurnal terms. 3. If the post-war period – captioned somewhat unsatisfactorily by the designators ‘Fordism’ and ‘Keynesianism’ – saw the subsumption of workers not only as labor power but as purchasing power. for TC. prison and university. but they only did it by separating. insurrection at night. but it also appears in spatial terms: the occupiers had disrupted or blocked not the economy itself but its ideological manifestation in the school of business. beginning in the 1970s and.’138 We might take as a particularly illustrative moment here the following resonant sentence in a communiqué issued by ‘fellow precarious workers in the occupied ASOEE’ (the Athens University of Economics and Business): ‘Work during the morning. an institution charged with reproducing class relations through the training of managers.’ something else begins to happen during the crisis of the 1970s. focused instead on the institutions charged with reproducing the class relation (labor unions. entrepreneurs and technocrats. ‘treated like grown-ups. as storefront and trade-union office. and on the police as a disciplining moment of social-reproduction. with a great show of solicitude and politeness.’139 The glass floor. completed in the mid 1990s. in their new role as consumers. in their attacks and in their objectives. the moments and the institutions of social reproduction. as riot cop and shopping mall. they put themselves in question as proletarians in their struggle.

In advanced capitalist or post-industrial economies. quickening their turnover and reproduction. and finally industries concerned with the administration of flows of goods and bodies (information technology. clerical work. The old organs and tropes of working class identity and autonomy – political parties. as revolutionary self-consciousness. meeting halls – have collapsed. management and circulation of commodities (including labor-power). by looking at its technical or use-value side. The restructuring dislocates the working-class from its own self-realization and self-abolition by way of the revolutionary seizure of the means of production. but we can more fully develop their conclusion about the promises and impasses of the present period by looking at the material transformation of capitalism over the last thirty-years. growth has occurred primarily in industries involved with the circulation or realization of commodities (transport and retail). a management of the existing forces of production for and by workers. speaking of an integration of the proletariat within capital – a mutual presupposition of capital and labor – such that any affirmation of a working-class identity is simply an affirmation of capital. and it is no longer possible to propose a dictatorship of the proletariat.Strategies of Struggle countries: fragmented and distributed in networks. health care). data-processing). colonized by rhetorics of self-management and flexibility. The relational terms that TC provide are crucial. distribution. but even the supposedly miraculous effects of information technology seem
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. TC tend to approach the restructuring in formal terms. industries designed to manage the reproduction of capital (finance) or labor (education. Capital depends more and more on erstwhile unproductive spheres that accelerate and direct flows of capital and labor from site to site. nearly impossible. The expansion of finance is the central manifestation of this shift. This reordering of the working class as in-itself – the reordering of what Italian operaismo call its technical composition – renders its conversion into the proletariat. trade unions. newspapers. rendered part-time and pushed into industries devoted to the sale.

Circulation no longer shrouds production in the mystifying forms of false equivalence. Overall. different than Russia in 1917 or Spain in 1936. The blockading of urban flows. they are a material limit. And in the ‘noisy sphere of circulation’ the noises we hear are those of the riot. impersonal coordination. disperses it laterally. at the level of use-value – as machinery. places where the industries of the means of subsistence were ready162
. the implications of such restructuring are more severe than they may at first seem. or at the very least some form of abstract. The ‘hidden abode of production’ is not so much invisible as inaccessible – covered by a glass floor. ready-to-hand. Because these complex forms of circulation penetrate the production process at the level of materiality. of exchange. the smashing and looting of shops – these tactics are given. For anti-state communists. and submits it to complex mediations. since we find nowhere. but penetrates it. and then stitched together by a growing pool of proletarianized technical and clerical workers.Communization and its Discontents to have mattered less as a way to increase productivity than as a way to decrease the costs of circulation and administration. The project of the ‘seizure of the means of production’ finds itself blocked. is where these fragmented parts come together – where the working-class is itself reassembled. built environment – they effectively presuppose the market. by the material coordinates of the current mode of production. exchange. in a way. workplaces so penetrated to their very core by the commodity-form that they solicit nothing less than total destruction. the use-values which might form the minimum base of subsistence for a future. And since he space of the market. or faced with the absurd prospect of collectivizing Wal-Mart or Apple. The collapse of an autonomous worker’s identity is an effect of this fragmentation – there can be no stable standpoint of labor when labor and labor-process itself are broken down into globally-dispersed segments. it should come as no surprise that this is where contestation primarily erupts. decapitalized society. This is different than France in 1871 or even 1968. infrastructure.

then. to uproot capital not merely as social form but as material sediment. an egalitarian set of social relations laid atop the existing means of production. If we want communism. These. And yet this barrier is now itself a condition of possibility. This is because. capital is a self-undermining social dynamic – the limit to capital is capital itself – one that establishes by its very own progress forward an increasingly intractable barrier to that progress: by compressing necessary labor (and gaining more surplus labor) it also compresses the pool of workers it can exploit. as the mass of surplus value grows ever larger. then we will have no choice but to take our radicalism to the root. If it is impossible to project a communist future from present bases. as one forces gasoline and oxygen into a piston. tendential one. the food. a problem that becomes more severe as capitalism progresses. It is thus the case that capitalism requires more and more robust institutions capable of forcing capital and labor into encounter. this means that. Seen as a totality. it becomes more and more difficult to wring subsequent increases in surplus labor from a relatively shrinking mass of workers. institutions devoted to the
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. clothing. It is the end of a communist politics that is merely redistributive. The vanishing of an autonomous ‘worker’s identity’ is not a mere ideological fact. as past revolutions did.Strategies of Struggle to-hand and expropriable. limits that we should see as merely the other side of the limits to capital. of the need for work. in some reasonable radius. are the limits for communism. Since capital must not only reproduce itself but expand. not merely as relations of production but as productive forces. This is a periodic phenomenon – crises of this sort recur – but also a linear. where one might have found. but a real feature of capitalism: the vanishing of workers themselves. it is also likewise impossible to project a capitalist one. capitalism in crisis thus produces masses of labor and masses of capital unable to find each other in the valorization process. returning to the point where we began. housing and medicine necessary for a future society liberated from the exigencies of value. since it renders incoherent all attempts to imagine.

they were. finds its complement in a university crisis. than other anti-austerity campaigns by university students in London or Puerto Rico. The banking crisis. Students are a proletariat in formation. and where labor-power must be moulded. It is here that private and government financial institutions manipulate the conditions of credit and money supply to induce investment. too. And it is here. university and student struggles are so prominent as recent examples of resistance.Communization and its Discontents reproduction of the capital-labor relationship. relatively. the events of 2009-2010 at university campuses in California are some of the most vigorous examples of rebellion in the US in recent years – indeed. over the last few years. allows us to expand our notion of antagonistic agents. until the unfolding
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. and as the value of such training decreases. indebted like the rest of the working class but indebted before they have begun to even earn a wage full time. that the prisons and universities and welfare-to-work offices discipline labor-power so that the right amount arrives at the right workplace at the right price. Seen in this way. to expand our notion of the proletariat – so that it includes the unemployed. where money and commodity capital must fight their way back into the workplace and their rendezvous with labor-power. shaped and forced into the site of production. as a process of production that contains moments both inside and outside of the workplace. unwaged houseworkers and prisoners. students. It also allows us to explain why. They thus exist in a relationship to the formal working class defined by the glass floor. Students confront the crisis of reproduction directly. 4. Examining capitalism in this way. as the cost of job training (tuition) increases. denied a middle-class future. double barricade Though smaller. crisis appears not only in the realization of commodities and fictitious capitals – the salto mortale from production into the market – but also within the underexamined outside of the capital-labor relationship: the place where one chain of M-C-M´ meets another. therefore.

Because the housing boom and crash and therefore the economic effects of the current crisis have been much stronger in California. breaking not only with the representational politics of the existing campus left. construction projects. the gutting of various programs deemed peripheral. can only be understood by way of looking at the relationship between the university and the larger. I will limit myself to a short recapitulation. If the glass floor is at present truly the determining condition of class struggle. but yoking these stances to confrontational. Communiqué from an Absent Future. as an important text. The speed at which these changes came – rendering visible a process of privatization and redefinition of education that remained largely invisible – goes some way in explaining the relative explosiveness of the moment. reduction in classes and enrolment. and the succouring of a bloated and inept administrative layer. restructuring of the labor force. As many will know. outpacing the usual political players on campus and escaping the ritual and theatrical forms of protest which had become sedimented into university life. this meant fee increases. In the multi-campus University of California system. California’s plight is for the most part simply an accelerated version of the crises affecting other states.
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. riven as it is by a strong anti-tax conservatism on the one hand and a legacy of liberal social commitments on the other. The precipitating events for the anti-austerity movement in California were not unique or anomalous but an accelerated version of the status quo in general. the appearance here and there of an explicitly communist politics. But the sudden radical character of the moment. incentive packages. probably the only significant resistance to the crisis yet visible in the US. all of which happened at the same as university managers directed their quite ample resources to financial gamesmanship. violent tactics. the state of California is perpetually insolvent. then we should be able to trace it in this history. high executive salaries.Strategies of Struggle events in Wisconsin. post-crisis economic landscape: the crisis rendered visible the ‘absent future’ of students. Since these events have been summarized and contextualized in detail elsewhere.

one that originated from the different orientations of different groups to the campus as a space and a material process. was defined not just by exploitation. one can note. were met by a much bleaker communist politics that promoted immediate negation and expropriation in the face of an absent future. Would we sit in or walk out? Would we blockade the campus the campus or occupy it? Were we a picket line or a march? There was a crisis of prepositions. Fully half of all new graduates were working jobs – if they had jobs at all – for which a college degree was not necessary. somewhat contradictorily.Communization and its Discontents put it. This is how the glass floor operated – with this radical layer meeting another student layer demanding integration into the system. while. speak-outs and the like – if not more disruptive tactics like occupation or sabotage. Thus the calls to ‘save public education’ or reform the university. the calls to restore funding. if not of verbs. an uneasy compound of tactics drawn alternately from the political vernacular of the labor movement on the one hand and student activism on the other. emptying the buildings and treating the open spaces of the campus according to logics of political assembly and discourse – teach-ins. with the unions picketing at the entrance to campus. The destruction of the university was taking place alongside a process of proletarianization. One remained
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.141 At the same time as students were being driven from the university. Although most of the major events involved both work stoppages and student strikes (or walkouts). students filled up the space behind them. and both of these layers reflected in the super-exploited campus workers who stood with them on the barricades. technical. From the very beginning of the university unrest there was significant investment in the idea of a student-worker movement – rather than a simple student movement. primarily in the orientation to the space of the campus. managerial ranks. shouldering massive debt loads could not look forward to secure employment in the professional. those who would stay. more and more. in which the proletariat. But the actual landscape turned out to be more complex than abstract calls for solidarity would make it appear. but by a pure dispossession from even the fact of exploitation.

By space. These are rather abstractions. The picket line treats the campus as a factory. The ‘walkouts’ and. positions within the scheme of the university which the actions of individuals animate as material. These are by no means clear distinctions – students often work in the university. or whether one sees such employment as already ripped from underneath one’s feet. whether the most effective stance took place inside or outside the campus. therefore. graduate students. but. Indeed. collective characters. and that. as with class. Most of the student-worker movement remained. are both students and workers. later. the occupations of buildings. it must be said. future employment opportunities.Strategies of Struggle uncertain whether the goal was to shut down the campus by emptying it out or by filling it up. whether one should overrun every barrier or erect barriers everywhere. here determined by the different structural positions that different groups occupy with regard to the university’s place within the regime of value. treat the university as a relay point within the circulation and formation of future labor power. site of production or exploitation. they give rise to combinatory orientations that turn out to be defining. From the standpoint of the student much seems to depend on whether one wants to open up access to the university and. largely reactive. as an apparatus of sorting that reproduces the value of labor-power by including some and excluding others. any one person might inhabit these positions unevenly. for instance. then. and understands that its geographical encirclement negates such production. They are real abstractions. whether the object of attack was a geographical zone or the social relations that took place there. consequently. as workplace. legitimates class society through a process of certification and ideological training. largely attached to the goal of increasing access to the university and therefore incapable of questioning the function of the
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. given the fact that these positions are in contradiction. I mean less a set of coordinates than a kind of orientation.

except in a very few cases that always involved large contingents of students. as waged proletarians. sabotage of university property. The preservationist impulse was felt first and foremost in the reluctance of students and faculty to sacrifice classtime to strikes and other disruptions. tactics that aim to bring the university’s activities to a halt. the preservationist impulse could convert to a logic of ‘transformation’ or ‘alternatives’ – taking over the space of campus. familiar figures of closure. in advance.Communization and its Discontents university with regard to reproduction of capitalist relations. rarely willing to physically prevent access to campus. This tendency will often speak about opening up the space of the university – whether by reducing the onerous fees that exclude poorer students. one finds. negation and refusal – picket lines encircling campus. education. also. rather than replace them with another set of activities. the preservationists often responded to radical elements with a facile paradox: why shut down the campus to protest the shutting down of the campus? At its limit. But the picketers were. and by extension the task of education. guerrilla film-screenings. It aimed merely to preserve what was soon to be lost – jobs. might exhibit an indifference to the actual content of their work – seeing it as merely a means to an end and therefore make their struggles about pay and benefits. developing policies and curricula that increase equity or. as merely temporary. a one or at most two-day strike. turning over campus property to those who are not part of the ‘campus community’. and liberating it – with teach-ins and skill-shares. Alongside the political logic of the opening. We might think that the position of students as quasiconsumers of the use-value of education means that they will exhibit this preservative stance. Given the abysmal record of gains from worker struggles over the last few decades – where even most hard-fought and bitter struggles yield meagre
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. political theatre and the like. in its most expansive form. buildings barricaded. small riots – tactics aimed not at transformation but suspension and disruption. and their withdrawal of their labor was always given. But the lines between these two forms are not always that precise. whereas many campus workers. classes – to save or defend public education.

is more a hall-of-mirrors in which students meet themselves coming. proletarians. The glass floor. as we will see. where workers find. Students. in this respect. but often ethereal. held out for them. workers a certain consequentiality. a figure of division and separation than it is a figure of folding and crossing – in which each group finds itself presupposed. where each group recognizes its essential truth in the other. and where both groups become. and can rely on more than written sources – but because its relatively incendiary character provides a strong enough light in which to read the shapes described above. to an enervated realpolitik. fall victim to equally weak forms of refusal. then. The first thing one notices in looking back
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. It is less. And while one might expect airy voluntarism and grim determinism to wear each other down without anything of consequence coming from the face-to-face. too. I take as example the dramatic occupation of Wheeler Hall at UC Berkeley on November 20 not only because I know it well – I was there. They. Students (and I think they act here as stand-ins for a more general ‘marginal’ figure – the unemployed. then any intense manifestation should be legible in these terms. their missing antagonism.Strategies of Struggle and temporary gains – the willingness of workers to really risk their own jobs in a protracted struggle is low. what can occur in political struggles (and what did occur. replete with dubious rhetorics of democratization and representation. on the other hand. folded into and implicated by the other. Freed from contestations around the wage. in California) is a fruitful mixing of these different impulses or tendencies. workers. the partially employed. as workers-in-formation. outside. If this is truly the sign under which the contemporary hangs. in the process. incline toward a kind of weak positivity – a weak alternativism. for the large part aim to keep existing rights and privileges from being eroded. their political imagination becomes more expansive. briefly. the shape of things to come. all those who are antagonistic to the current order but must fight outside of the point of production) hold a certain latitude of political action.

As barrier – begging to be overrun – it underscored what those inside the building shared with those outside. While the occupiers barricaded themselves into the second floor of the building – using chairs. its ordering of space and time according to the law of value.Communization and its Discontents over the events of the day is the ambiguity of the barricade – in other words. it rendered itself impotent and transferred the point of antagonism from the inside to the outside. and a weapon in the hands of antagonists. the police lines were themselves surrounded and briefly overwhelmed by thousands of protesters. rubber bullets and the threat of arrest. The outside becomes an inside. Then. but just as often the limits are self-imposed. unless the removal of this or that space from the value-form spreads. concessions or a simple lack of will to continue. and the act of negation converts into this or that form of preservation. If the earlier topological figure disclosed a division between those who would turn their back on the university and those who would preserve it. which they defended with batons. it becomes quickly reinscribed within such. new forms of refusal need to take root. But as any number of examples demonstrate. the barricade was both a block against and manifestation of the simplest form of solidarity: physical proximity. The double barricade and the double siege – the occupiers besieged by police themselves besieged– lights up the topology discussed above. the ambiguity of the inside/outside distinction produced above. To survive. first with police tape and then with metal barricades. an enforcement of the rule of property by the police. and the space collapses under its own gravity. tie-downs and their own hands to deny the police entry – scores of riot police set up a perimeter around the building. The police are the agents of this reinscription. We can think of the first moment – the occupation of the building and the locking of its doors – as primarily an act of refusal. leading to bargaining. in a subsequent moment. u-locks. As limit.
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. an attempt to establish an outside within the administrative regime of the university. a new outside needs to be set up. The barricade is both a police mechanism.

When they barricade the exits and entrances of the libraries (in order to prevent the occupiers from being brought via tunnels. in the space opened up by the rupture.142 But they can do so only in the context of an expanding rupture. the phone calls and text messages and posts on the internet. disposed spatially both in an outward and an inward direction: theirs is a form of exit that stands in place. stasis and compromise that can emerge from inside antagonism. against the repressive countermovement of the police. To the extent that. the improvised chants. The antagonists on campus have become indistinguishable from the so-called ‘outside agitators’ – important here and elsewhere – upon whom the university managers blame the unrest. The limits of this or that form of belonging. by opening up spaces of rupture. at the same time. now on the inside of the campus. Still. lest they fall back into the idle provision of alternatives that are more of the same. The campus is both truly opened up and. they fend off the moment of repression. they must fill in this space if the outside continues to grow: the oranges and sandwiches thrown. into other buildings. These actions only survive by continuously pushing their own outside in front of them. a refusal that is also an affirmation. In fact. the spontaneous redecorations of campus. over the riot-helmeted heads of the police. The students and workers who gather in front of the police belong to their unbelonging. The line of demarcation – the picket – converts into the barricades around the building. status or privilege. are for a brief moment shattered by the polarizing force of the barricade. and from there packed into police vans) they cement their own refusal. people learn to provide for each other. closed. the cups of soup and energy bars passed out to those assembled in front of the barricades. to the masked occupiers on the second floor window.
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. just as important are the alternate forms of belonging or sociality that fill in the space left by the expanding outside. and continuously inviting and then transcending not only the repression of the police and the rule of property but also forms of settlement.Strategies of Struggle the occupation of Wheeler Hall represents an involution of this topology.

in its contradiction with capital within the capitalist mode of production. a double swerve. from inside to outside and from outside to inside. As much as they suggest that there is no longer an affirmable identity for the working class that is not at the same time an affirmation of capital.Communization and its Discontents 5. acting strictly as a class of this mode of production. and therefore itself. abolish classes.
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. futureless youth will migrate into the sites of exploitation proper and the mass of workers will. but they still lay a great amount of stress on the agency of workers qua workers. that is to say: produce communism?’143 The political sequence which they see emerging in Greece and elsewhere suggests that the suspension of proletarian identity which one witnesses on the part of the disenfranchised. residue of their councilist origins. Without denying the necessity of interrupting valorization and value at its source. turning them over to come who may? One suspects that communization as such will involve both types of movement. This is the swerve: ‘the proletariat’s negation of its existence as a class within its action as a class [emphasis mine]’. TC define the central question for a communist theory as follows: ‘how can the proletariat. or between the waged and unwaged proletariat. why is it that the swerve of self-abolition must begin there? Why is it not possible for self-abolition – the production of communism – to emerge in between the site of exploitation and its outside? And ultimately. in realizing the futility of revindicative struggles and self-management both. rather than at the point of mutual presupposition between capital and labor. what difference does it make if a mode of production based upon value and compulsory labor is abolished from without or within? What difference would it make if the sites of valorization are overtaken by marginal proletarians who have no claim on them or if the workers in those sites communize them. join with the fraction of rebellious youth. double swerve Rather lucidly. I wonder if TC do not retain a hint of a certain sentimental workerism. If the proletariat no longer has a self within the site of production. TC see this swerve as rigorously determined by the structure of the capital-labor relationship. the self-negation heretofore occurring on the margins must move to the center. they still locate the swerve inside the site of valorization.

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And they leave to head off this invasion rather than wait for the battle on their own land. they get that not fighting will lead to the destruction of their community and resources. to put down their plows and pick up swords. and even though some recognize the lord’s interest is not in their well-being but in the protection of his assets.Fire to the Commons Evan Calder Williams
There is a medieval community. It’s announced by the lord that there is a coming danger – an invading horde. a small village on a lord’s estate. When
. an exceptional measure to deal with an exceptional threat. the armies of another estate – that will ruin all of their livelihoods. the invading army pulls back. They fight battles. not professional soldiers. Those in the community agree that such a threat could ruin them. individual belongings and things used by all alike. but coming together as an army of sorts. as it were. but ultimately. many of them die. The lord calls them to arms. They therefore become militants: that is.

As such. The topic of this essay is that oven. now charred both inside and out. it changes little in this case.Communization and its Discontents the militants return to their village. and what is common amongst us have to do with communism? The bigger change is that we are speaking of the social and material relations of capital: there has long been no village to which we might return. to do away with their lord. However.
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. one of the only things that remains standing is the unburnable communal oven. For the question is: do common things. and particularly in positions often seen as aligned to those at stake in this volume. distinct as it seems. and communism is the return to what has been left behind: it is an overcoming of the present in the name of this betrayed unity. the story is both an imprecise allegory for the contradictions of the present and a marker of a mode of life and ‘cause’ for struggle that seem definitively bygone. to relate to such a lost commons144 or ‘being in common’ in one of three ways: 1 We have lost our commons and our common essence. It has been laid to waste by another threat when they were off fighting the battle to which their lord had directed them. and patterns) to mount an insurrection. More than that. Whether or not the cooking fire within had been kept going seems unimportant. At the center of the village. it has to do with the connection between that oven as ‘common’ to its users and that fighting mass as an assembly of those with something ‘in common.’ It has to do with the mode of relation designated as common. they find it in flames. to make civil war. having things in common. locales. We could change the story such that the villagers are not responding to the injunction of a lord to defend but are leaving their world (their everyday circuits. Yet there is a tendency. recurring across the spectrum of communist writing. Everything is wrecked.

I do not.Strategies of Struggle 2 There are older vestiges of the commons. ‘proliferate’ their use.’ communization – is a ‘making common’: acts of sharing. as such. including reappropriation from the ownership of one into the ownership of all (or. that they are disruptive or ‘unthinkable’ for capital) – most importantly. against capital’s attempts to privatize/ expropriate/enclose them. and one of our tasks is to defend them. and one of our tasks is to defend them.145 Rather. are capable of significantly accelerating a movement toward – or of – communism – the thought that ‘the commons’ constitute a rupture in the reproduction and circulation of value (that is. and encourage the spread of the form of the common. that persist. often electronic resources. Related argument: capital has generated – or there have generated in spite of capital – new commons. the idea that communism has to do with what we have in common with each other My rejection of these comes from a conviction that communism – the
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. often material resources such as water. the ownership of none). are the acts that produce or reveal what is common across singularities. my targets at hand are: – the thought of return – the thought that acts of ‘making common. 3 The elaboration of communism – the infamous how of ‘transition. in better formations.’ outside of a scenario of economic and political upheaval. disagree with any of these in full.

sparking ‘commons’ rather than a dwindling reserve (as in give fire to the commons. capital is always a mode of reproduction and exclusion: surplus-value is produced by living labor. this title is more than a provocation. However. for they have long been banal). from decimated resources to overproduction’s unrecuperable goods and dead factories. for capital. remnants of the past or degraded kernels of the present to be exploded outward. because of a fundamentally ‘uncapitalizable’ content. what Adorno would call the ‘nonidentical. It’s intended to capture a sequence of moves. though that it is. what has been happening for centuries: capital gives fire to the commons. it is what it necessarily brings about yet cannot manage. or. it’s an injunction for the real movement of
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. At worst. It is also a gesture toward the sense of an active. even as it’s composed on the fact of what cannot be capital. and it is the relation between that which is capital and that which could be capital. a conception of communism as the project of unfolding a category of capital. In this way.’ And it is the basis of the thoughts here. and of what can no longer enter circulation. worse. the material of the contradiction thrown to the side. that growing mass of surplus labor power that cannot be incorporated so as to make use of its potential surplus labor. It is what simply doesn’t compute in this relation. the crucial point is that even that which can’t be capital isn’t so because of an essence or property of its own. changing. It is a description of what is the case. but the social relations that enable. at best a corrective. insist upon. a holding pattern. lets them remain a bounded zone with the hope that it generates new sparks outside of ‘market forces’ and that such dynamism can be made profitable. too often becomes a nostalgia. As such. rather than the development of the contradiction of that category. Such a search for pockets. the slag of the dialectic.’ Class indexes only this relation of capital and what could be. and are bolstered by the material consequences of production and circulation are never made ‘for the first time. Such a threat is. or it burns them clear and begins laying other groundwork. For capital is a relation.Communization and its Discontents elaboration of capital’s contradictions – doesn’t begin with what capital hasn’t quite gotten around to colonizing. Lastly.

that loathsome exception.’ However. Jacques Camatte and others associated with Invariance. as it is the drive of communism not to ‘develop new social relations’ but to dissolve this society. or the ways in which histories from below have brought forth constant battles. Such is the consequence not of a perspectival shift from Marxism (as can be seen in his later work) but of an historically situated Marxist claim as to the fully transformative effects of the increasing ‘autonomization’ of capital. real and formal subsumption. my drive is to trouble the concept of the common itself. and a special emphasis on an interpretation of capital as ‘value in process. finally. particularly the ‘autonomization of exchange value.’ including my concern here. Rather. along with a set of loose theses on form. on transition at once necessary and unable to articulate where it’s going. and. on ‘time’s carcass’ and nothing in common. it is Camatte’s major work Capital and Community: the results of the immediate process of production and the economic work of Marx146 on which I’ll focus. and its open enclosures and well-spring of phantom commonness. Capital and Community begins with an extended reconstruction of aspects of Marx’s project. It’s on these terms that I turn to a particular corner of left communist thought. and banality. In particular. it is the set of historical and anthropological conclusions gathered in the second half that concern us. and on to the messy. It’s the last that deserves initial clarification.’ the relation between dead and living labor. content. as I’m not questioning the force of thought or deed of groups such as the Diggers or Levellers. difficult fact of figuring out how to live beyond the category!). particularly in the discussion of the ‘universal class’ and the senza riserve (the without-reserves) that Camatte incorporates. particularly the exploration of how class is no longer coherent the way it had been figured by major lineages of Marxism. as such. however ‘dissidently. the necessity of struggles over access to land and water. But it’s also close to
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. grouped around Amadeo Bordiga and those who drew from him.Strategies of Struggle communism (fire to the commons. Such a claim is present in Bordiga’s work as well.

in all its different stripes. Excluding for the moment a longer discussion of causality and counterfactual possibility (might that defeat have not been?). a double consequence of that real historical defeat and a transition in the organization of capital.147 One of the major questions posed by Capital and Community. or capable of coming together. Present-day society lives from a momentarily defeated revolution. For Camatte. not just in terms of Debord’s point about ‘the extension of the logic of factory labor to a large sector of services and intellectual professions’ but a wider-sweeping claim about the dissolution and dissemination of a previously distinct category of proletarian experience and identity. temporary associations. the attempt to negate classes would have had no chance of success if there had not been another cause for its birth: the defeat of the world proletariat in the period 1926-28.Communization and its Discontents a disparate set of theses. a common relationship to capital. of the particular coherency of the working class as an entity unified. a diffusion of antagonism. however discontinuous and heterogeneous. consider this sense of a double ‘defeat’: first. a question that remains arguably the dominant research of left and ultraleft communist thought. gathered in English as Marx Beyond Marx) to theories of proletarianization. of a concrete. this might be understood as a story of decomposition. In another sense. of a previous order of class differentiation.e. political program of the proletariat. or ‘negation’. the successive collapses of revolutionary movements in the 20th century) and the recomposition. ranging from the ’70’s work of Italian Marxists on ‘social capital’ (most pointedly in Negri’s 1978 lectures on the Grundrisse. for the ‘mystification’ is not of the simple order of ideological inversion. it is about a dissipation of energy. away from historical worker’s parties into an increasingly jumbled set of alliances. and second. and positions. Mystification means power of capital plus the defeat of the proletariat. is the relation between the ‘defeat of the proletariat’ (i. by having something in common. namely.
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. Rather.

the general equivalent leads to the autonomy of money as increasingly unbound from its particular applications in discrete acts of exchange. the ‘content’ – of exchange. This relation. however. which stands against
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. is not a relation between distinct entities: it is the single relation of singular things becoming irrelevant. that of the loss of the ancient (and medieval) community (Gemeinswesen). the developing ‘autonomization’ of exchange. The shift described is two-fold. It is the runaway outcome of the generalization of exchange: ‘So exchange produces two results: the formation of money. and this produces the autonomization not of money as such (the ‘monetary community’ as mid-stage in the domination of capital) but of the single relation. of what has been materially.’ In other words. from communities that exchange as communities (i. and the autonomization of a single relation.148 which Camatte extends as the ‘material community’. This general process is what underpins Marx’s notion of money as the real community. of the wider trajectory sketched by Camatte. the subsequent slow emergence of the ‘material community’ of capital. there is potentially exchange between communities) to the introduction of exchange into those communities (between individuals) and the development of a diffuse community of exchange. as laborers. the further autonomization of this double community (as general substance. i. begins to generate an ‘outside’ external to the community’s relations that becomes the fully formed material community of capitalism. it is a story of loss and supplantation. and phase. in the money form.e. and as external contingency) of money. and the task of the development of the ‘human community’ of the real domination of communism. First. the general equivalent that tends to autonomy. Second.Strategies of Struggle However. this should be taken as a particular element. medium and measure. as value will come to subordinate property relations per se. not just ideologically. as it is the general form of equivalence – everything is in common with everything else – that forms the real abstraction of value. displaced in the shift from communities exchanging as a whole to individuals as the arbiters – and.e. As such. This constitutes the basic position of the proletariat.

Communization and its Discontents capital which completes its domination by constituting itself into a material community. The proletariat’s power is created by capital itself. Capital is the cause of its growth and unification, and it is also capital that creates the objective base of the new social form: communism. For this occasion, and this occasion alone, I’m not concerned with working through the promises and consequences of his ‘political’ conclusion: the political act that inaugurates the ‘formal domination of communism’ and liberates this society toward the ‘end of politics’ and development of a new human community (the ‘real domination of communism’), of which the party is a superstructural figuration. Of more immediate interest is a note added in May 1972, following his theory of the formal domination of communism and, among other things, the proposition that in that period, ‘No more value, man is no longer “time’s carcass”’ (emphasis mine). The note begins: The study of the formal domination of communism above is valid only for the period during which the communist revolution ought to take place on the basis of the formal domination of capital over society, and also, to a certain degree, for the transition period to real domination. But since the generalization of real domination world-wide (1945) this has been totally superseded. This, then, is a calling into doubt of ‘transition programs’ that might imply a new bureaucratic structure and, more importantly, the scale of that anthropomorphic inversion of man and capital, the final evacuation of determinant differences that would let one speak of a human, under capital, that was ‘formally’ dominated but not ‘really dominated’ in full. In short, that retained a content that, however bent into and constrained by the forms of capital, was something else: a species being that was not mere instinct and biological trait, a content common and ready to be freed by the liberation of productive forces or liberation from production, to take
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Strategies of Struggle two well-known variants. My stress on content is not accidental, as a survey back through Marxist thought, and especially left-communist traditions, reveals the enormous and fraught conceptual weight invested in the opposition of form and content. It would be a mistake to pass this off as a consequence of the rhetorical utility of such terms. Running from debates about organizational form (for instance, critiques, such as Gilles Dauvé’s, of councilism as preserving capitalist ‘content’ while swapping out the form of management) to the content of communism (and the degree to which it is positive and ‘transhistorical’), to take just two indicative examples, the problem of form/content obsesses and curses communist thought. In one of its many mobilizations in Camatte’s writing, we read in the ‘Conclusions’ of Capital and Community: However, the dialectic does not remain empty in Marxism, its presupposition is not a material, but a social, fact. It is no longer a form which can have whatever content, but that this content, being, provides it with the form. The being is the proletariat, whose emancipation is that of humanity. This is a relatively faithful account of how form and content function in the Marxian dialectic. Following Hegel, for Marx, the active development of content gives forth to the form latent in it: form is neither an external abstraction that qualifies content nor is it a pre-existing structure of intelligibility. It emerges from the particularity of the content. Such a notion, and such a commitment to this model of form and content, is at the root of that critique of councilism mentioned, insofar as it grasps that to have ‘swapped the forms’ does not alter the underlying capitalist content as such, does not allow the content of communism to develop a form adequate to itself, and, lastly, mistakes capital for a problem of form, as if due to a slippage between the value form and ‘forms of organization’. Briefly, I want to flesh out a notorious example to give a sense of
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Communization and its Discontents how this conceptual opposition bears on ‘the common’ and the degree to which we should speak of a ‘content of communism,’ particularly insofar as that content has to do with the flourishing of the common.149 In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx writes, ‘Time is everything, man is nothing; he is, at the most, time’s carcass.’ This appears, initially, as just a conveniently catastrophic metaphor. However, we might read it in three ways. 1 In the loosest interpretation, that takes it primarily as a ramped up modifier of the preceding sentence concerning how ‘one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour,’ man is ‘time’s carcass’ insofar as man’s specificity is killed, leaving man a carcass animated by value and made to labor, simply a unit of potential activity subordinated to labor time. 2 If we recall the particularity of form and content in Marx, however, we approach a different perspective, a trajectory sketched in a single sentence. The active development, via laboring of man as labor power (the content)150 produces the material conditions for labor time (the form). However, the perversity of capital is that this form does not remain adequate to its content. It becomes divorced from it and increasingly autonomous. But this is not the story of a form that simply takes leave from its originary content and ‘becomes everything,’ simply dominant. Rather, it comes to determine the content in a constant passage back and forth, to force it to accord with the development of that form: any opposition between form and content becomes increasingly incoherent. As such, man is time’s carcass in that living labor power is valued only in accordance with its form: it is that form, fully developed into the general equivalence of value, alone which is of worth.
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Strategies of Struggle Man, the original source of that form, is a husk dominated by an abstraction with no single inventor. Form fully reenters and occupies the content as if it were dead matter, incapable of generating further adequate forms. And when it is productive to do so, time makes those bones dance. 3 Man – or rather, the human as more than the common man of capital – is that which is born in the death of time. It is the leftover of the collapse of capital, and it is the faint prospect, in the decomposition of the dominant social relation (the representation that mediates between labor power and labor time), of an existence that outlives capital. We are finally in a position to return back to the question of the common. If one recognizes, as we must, that both the ‘human community’ of communism and a denser form of older community life are fully displaced by the material community of capital, and, furthermore, that appeals to either seem unconvincing as scalable models of resistance capable of contesting the social relations of capital, then the only thing common to us is our incorporation into that material community. But this is not a deadening or a subtraction of what we once had: it is the construction and imposition of a common position, the production of a negative content in accordance with a universal form. Camatte writes that, ‘The proletarian (what man has become) can no longer recognize himself in a human community, since it no longer exists[...] Men who have become pure spirits can rediscover themselves in the capital form without content.’ Without content, indeed, insofar as content is taken to be that from which form emerges. But capital (as social relation) is nothing if not the generative collapse of a distinction between form and a content. The common becomes, then, the quality across individuals that is neither a form nor a content: it is the form of
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Communization and its Discontents general equivalence taken as general content. Marx points out that ‘The equivalent, by definition, is only the identity of value with itself.’151 The full subsumption of experience to the law of equivalence, accelerated all the more during a period of the ‘socialization of labor,’ therefore produces with it a hollow identity that defines man, an echo chamber of value with itself. Capital founds a negative anthropology, in that the subject common to it is the subject defined only by being potentially commensurable, as source of value, with all else that exists. There is a double move described by Marx here: Labor capacity has appropriated for itself only the subjective conditions of necessary labor - the means of subsistence for actively producing labor capacity, i.e. for its reproduction as mere labor capacity separated from the conditions of its realization – and it has posited these conditions themselves as things, values, which confront it in an alien, commanding personification.152 First, ‘labor capacity’ (read: those who labor) only appropriates for itself ‘subjective conditions’: the active work of appropriation, that marks a subject, takes on only the conditions that allow it to reproduce itself as mere labor capacity. Second, even that paltry haul of subjective conditions are then posited, materially and perspectivally, as a set of hostile objects and conditions, a personification external to itself and no more. If we have something in common, it is this very motion. More bluntly, we have nothing in common, and not because we are atomized individuals. No, what is common across us, the reserve of common ground to which those ‘without-reserves’ could turn, the site on which the universal class begins,153 is nothing but the rendering of all things as formally common to each other (belonging to none, able to be endlessly circulated and reproduced) and of ourselves as the grounding unit of that dissolution of particular content. What, then, of those ovens? Not of the common relation between us but the commons, the material things around which such relations are
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Strategies of Struggle crystallized? A first issue is raised above, in that common can, and often does, point not to the owned by all but rather to the potential exchange of all by all, the equivalence of what is rendered in common with everything else through the form of value and the medium and measure of money. Of more interest is a point initially grounded on definitions and their histories. Rather, an etymology gives a way in. Etymologies are not in themselves useful, and often denote a certain preciousness. That said, sometimes they help us say what we mean and remind us of what we have been saying in place of that. In casual speech, common runs alongside banal as its nobler cousin. Everyday, popular, yes, but linked to a deep, rooted essence, a content that persists despite the accidents of form. Banal has none of that. It is gray ephemera, the stupidity of a fleeting present, what should and will be forgotten. Quotidian, forgettable, known to all but of genuine interest to none. The word banal came into English from French, from the Old French banel, or ‘communal.’ But further back, in its 13th century usage, it comes from ban, which includes both the sense of legal control or decree and the payment for the use of a communal resource, like an oven. In other words, the oven is not common. It is banal, because it is owned by none of those who use it communally, but it is still beholden to the logic and relations of property. It is a resource for the reproduction of a form of life and masquerades as an exception to that form, if any pretence would be made about its social use. So too so much of what we claim as ‘the commons’ today: they are simply banal. They are those things still in circulation, even as we figure them as exceptions to the regime of accumulation and enclosure. Capital has not, as some claim, rendered things common in the way that ‘new social relations’ could allow us to transform the logic of the present into a basis for upheaval. It has rendered all things common in that they are
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Communization and its Discontents commensurable, but the other side of the nothing-in-common we have become is this pseudo-commons of the banal. The point of communism is to develop contradictions, but this general acceleration of banality – the counterpart to the immiseration of entire populations and evisceration of resources, the tack taken by states who prefer to make social institutions ‘communal’ again so as to dodge the bill of social welfare spending – is neither contradiction nor generative potential. To take it as such is to simply gather around that last remaining oven, poking at its dull embers. Despite the specificity of the volume, I have not yet spoken of communization, for the simple reason that I have not yet spoken of transition. My concern has been how we understand the position in which we find ourselves and how that relates to our discontinuous instances, what might chain them together, what forms of thought could aid that work. The notion of communization, as I understand its lineages and theoretical utility, means not that the transition to communism has already begun simply because the limits of a previous sequence of working-class struggles are becoming unavoidable. Nor does it mean that it can begin at our behest, through the development of practices of being in common and making common, through the commune as form and through doubled tactics of expropriation and sharing, resulting in a local withdrawal of singularities (bodies and commodities as stripped of exchange value) from circulation. Rather, it is a theory that casts doubt on the notion of transition and that concerns what used to be called a revolutionary period. I am not alone in severely doubting the degree to which, given the current geopolitical order, any notion of a ‘general revolution against capital’ obtains. Uprisings, revolts, and insurrections seem even less likely now than previously to be ‘about’ value in any explicit way: if anything, a more precise theory should make sense of how the apparent, and real, content of historically determined struggles over democratic representation, outright repression of the populace, racism and patriarchy, food shortages, changes in pension and retirement law, denial of social services, real wages, and ecological catastrophe have already and will continue to run into an increasing set
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Strategies of Struggle of deadlocks shaped by the limits of the material and social form of the reproduction of capital. Despite this, one of the values of guarding a notion of ‘revolution’ is that it marks a distinct sequence that exacerbates and explodes a set of given conditions and that cannot be produced ex nihilo by radical practices. If the contradictions of capital generate a cursed dialectic of form and content, such that the form dominates the content at the same time that it cannot be separated from it, the elaboration of communist thought and strategy is to inflect and impel this worsening contradiction. Not to pathetically cheer at the failure of ‘reformist’ struggles and not to scour them in the hopes of finding the common element hidden in them, but to see in them the determined contours of the relations of capital, the demands placed on those bodies that work and die, the representations that bind together and mediate ‘the material conditions to blow this foundation sky-high.’ The vicious fact of it is that it simply is not our decision. We choose a period of capital as much as we choose an earthquake. Yet to make of this a principle, not of withdrawal but of holding on and forth: such would be a courage and a line worth taking. To hate the ruined and the unruined alike, with neither fetish nor indifference, to know that we cannot make our time, but that it does not, and never will, unfold untouched. Communization, then, is not an option we choose to take, but it is not an inevitability. It is a situation that will present itself, given the limits of capital, and it is a situation that has no guarantee of ‘leading to communism.’ To say that such a state of affairs will come to pass is very different from saying how they will come to pass, how the necessary measures taken by what has no reserve will happen, and what kind of resistance, physical and intellectual, they meet and for how long. The concept of invariance is an important one for the Bordigist tradition on which I’ve drawn, and it remains one today, though not in the sense of a transhistorical organizational form, a universal communist content, or unchanging line of attack and analysis. Rather, I mean the
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Because one cannot exclude from those infamous ‘objective conditions’ all that constitutes the given terrain of a period. but our thinking and fighting inflect that break all the same. and frequently incoherent. such that we become channels or levies designed to simply mitigate. and access to social services. We’re ground down and smoothed. the networks and connections built between comrades over years. sure. For communism has no content. the skills and resources we have or take. a general angle of inflection. to ground any communist project and that insists that things will not unfold as we expect them to. we can expect only that there will be difficult losses and gains. All the more reason for us to be rigorous. Between those material reversals and inversions of communization.Communization and its Discontents invariance of this sort of principle. and a learned familiarity of not knowing if a day will start and end in a world that feels remotely the same. to build up the kind of analyses and practices that may be of use or necessity. including an enormous set of ‘subjective’ and ‘affective’ conditions: words that have been in the air. and in the streets. to keep clear heads. impasses. For such a time of catastrophe breaks onto a shore that’s never a bare fact of economy. the trends of cultural production. It is an exertion of pressure that makes us capable of reading in the scattered field of breakdowns a correlation. that refuses to look ‘elsewhere. can only be messy. reproductive rights. and cracks composed of all of this that are our concern. the intellectual and material practice of what could be called the Party is. contradictory. a fraying pattern from which our modes cannot be separated. but a falling apart of what we’ve come to expect ‘resistance’ to look like and the coming forth of what had no place before. It is the deadlocks. and it is not form. home. Not the quick falling away of forms of thought or the development of new relations as such.’ to a far past or future after capital. that sense of things getting worse at work. persisting across transformations. the social habits of the rich. In this way. attacks on minorities and immigrants. And moreover. It is decomposi190
. successes and failures of struggles over wages. a recognition that the processes of the decay and dismantling of social relations. at its best. and the world built in their image.

That carcass of time. though not everywhere at once. they give off heat. before. with the absent content of having nothing in common. At the least. Such times do and will come. But we should not forget that when bodies decompose and start to fall apart. It begins not outside. It starts in times when a set of material limits show themselves as being unsurpassable other than by a practical appropriation of necessary goods and an accompanying rejection of social forms. the subject of equivalence. and all the real relations that sustain between them. time and labor. and uncertain undoing of the representations that mediate form and content. loosing that energy bound up and frozen in its particular arrangement. is one such shape. or after. It is the mass. value and property.Strategies of Struggle tion.
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. Let’s gather around that corpse instead and warm our hands there. petrified as it may appear. committed. let’s stop coming back to the scorched village and the banal oven. stop blowing on its cold coals. How it will go is hard to say. over the hot wind rising from the end of the common and the start of a slow thaw a long time coming. but right there.

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riots. The Destructive Character.’155 For all that.Make Total Destroy John Cunningham
Everything cleared away means to the destroyer a complete reduction. However. Contemporary capitalism’s state of exception has yet to be punctured or disabled by a praxis of unalloyed negation.
. destructive negation has never been so well expressed. Walter Benjamin. the State’s capacity to manage and control the most necessary acts of resistance in terms of blockades. The phrase is apparently ‘an old Anarchist injoke referencing the mangled English and almost self-parodying militant image of the Greek Anarchists. however militant. demonstrations and occupations shouldn’t be underestimated.154
I’ve always liked the phrase ‘make total destroy’ both for its apt summation of the affective resonance of being submerged in capitalism and its agrammatical punk elegance. of his own condition. Ignoring this can lead to an aestheticization of destruction – black bloc images. indeed eradication. textual declarations of social war – at odds with any capacity to institute such measures.

and a revolutionary process which is itself communism. In the 1970s French ultra-leftist Jacques Camatte linked the uncritical valorization of a negation predicated upon violence with ‘repressive consciousness’ – the elevation of theory and a ‘militant’ subjectivity into a self-identification with revolutionary praxis. The actual end of an
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.157 This can actually block the emergence of revolt and submerge it within what Camatte termed ‘rackets’ of anticapitalist enterprise. The anti-productivist seizure of the productive apparatus and the destruction of any notion of the ‘proletariat’ and ‘commodity’ would lead to an absolute rupture and break with capitalism. the destructive moment of communization would be qualitatively different from what’s thought of as political violence. Tracing this line of negation in communization might illuminate both communization and concepts of destructive negation in earlier anticapitalist theorizations of political violence. An Anti-Political Violence? One question that needs to be immediately addressed is the role a simplistic valorization of ‘make total destroy’ plays in simply reproducing the capitalist social relation in anticapitalist milieus. As such. as well as figuring out in what other ways ‘make total destroy’ might be understood. communization ‘does not take the old material bases as it finds them: it overthrows them.’156 Communization is the negation of all the elements of capital without a transitional ‘workers’ state’. The breaking of the reproductive cycle of our needs being based on maintaining capitalism would itself be an integrated process of the communizing of production and social reproduction. All too often an identification of anti-capitalism with destructive negation fulfils this role.Communization and its Discontents But where does this leave communization? As the eradication of the very ground upon which the structural violence of capital is erected communization is seemingly the most relentlessly destructive of contemporary anticapitalist tendencies. As Gilles Dauvé writes. Communization would be an almost unimaginable throwing into question of what production and social reproduction might mean.

’159 Any theorisation of destructive negation should conceptualise it formally through the abstractions of ‘the philosophy of its history’. discriminating. self-validating “explanations”’. blockades and occupations – could almost be taken for granted but this anti-politics should also be present in a critique that deactivates any nascent ‘repressive consciousness’. The existence of violence in capitalism provides the condition for a critique that acts through abstraction in order to avoid ‘repressive consciousness’. where he writes that: ‘The critique of violence is the philosophy of its history […] Because only the idea of its development makes possible a critical. The ‘philosophy’ of the brief history of communization as a theoretical
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. Critique itself would be filtered through the prism of abstraction. The anti-political violence implicit within communization – even on a theoretical level – should be corrosive of ‘repressive consciousness’ and ‘rackets’. Camatte’s caveat about violence is that ‘each individual must be violent with him/ herself in order to reject […] the domestication of capital and all its comfortable. A complimentary approach is suggested by Walter Benjamin in the essay ‘Critique of Violence’. and decisive approach to this temporal data.Strategies of Struggle identification with violent negation would be the perpetuation of a particular form of ‘revolutionary’ organization – the degeneration into clandestine resistance or an ideological sect being the apex of this – or simply the affirmation of extremity as a stylistic gesture. Such an exercise isn’t just genealogical – the tracing of a conceptual history – but is also an attempt to ensure that a false immediacy in valorizing destructive negation is deactivated and doesn’t reproduce ‘repressive consciousness’. Both help reproduce the conditions of capitalism and its constituent systemic violence in the form of a selfperpetuating conflict managed by ‘rackets’.158 I think this suggests that the rejection of the ‘domestication of capital’ by the ‘individual’ would be based upon studying the effects of the material processes of capital upon the ‘subjective’. That a communizing anti-politics would reject the institutional left – in favour of more diffuse forms of resistance such as wildcat strikes.

Periodizing Destruction What could be called the communization tendency in anticapitalism is in no way homogenous. The latter strand complicates the image of any communizing theoretical praxis by both productively incorporating the bio-political insights of Agamben and Foucault alongside a problematically naïve impetus towards a secessionist exit from existent social relations. unions) and ideologies (socialism and syndicalism) that valorized workers’ power – often expressed in a program of measures to be implemented after the revolution – and were emblematic of the 19th and 20th century workers’ movement. ‘programmatism’ is the forms of organization (mass parties. through to the post-Tiqqun milieu. In brief. with the former tracking communization through the varied structural contradictions of contemporary capitalism and the latter emphasising an active – if poetic – nihilism. It’s the former. This is evident when the question of periodization is considered. This is conceptualised by TC in terms of the decomposition of ‘programmatism’. and extends from the ultra-left influenced Troploin (Gilles Dauvé and Karl Nesic). TC argue that with an intensification of ‘real subsumption’ – essentially the submergence of the entirety of society within a self-positing capitalism – in the 1970s the ‘old’ workers’ movement and proletariat become further imbricated within the
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.Communization and its Discontents praxis is best tracked through looking at the questions raised around ‘programmatism’ by Théorie Communiste (TC). Endnotes. TC and Bruno Astarian.160 Both share a similar impetus towards and emphasis upon the negative. though there’s a wide divergence especially between Troploin and TC over the historical specificity of communization.161 As opposed to Troploin’s relatively invariant Marxist humanism TC emphasise that communization is a break with the past. more Marxist theoretical praxis within communization – especially TC – that seem to draw out the particular nature of negation as destruction within communization.

To untie the reproductive knot that strangles the proletariat is not a matter of freeing a productive proletarian essence that’s being constrained. And such a scenario would just replicate a political violence that remains locked into perpetuating particular apparatuses of power and force even if in the shape of supposedly anticapitalist milieus. Rather than the proletariat constituting an ‘outside’ to capital and feasting off its corpse. The destructive negation of communization is partly embodied in the violence of this break with the past of the ‘old’ workers’ movement – particularly so with TC. both decompose together in a shifting matrix of mutual need and opposition within the twin cycles of the reproductive shredding mechanism that TC term the ‘double moulinet’. Whatever the problems of being overly schematic in periodization – such as the temptation of determinism – the thesis of ‘programmatism’ is useful in delineating what a communizing ‘make total destroy’ might be. organizations. Of course. parties. This inheres in a rejection of both past forms of organization as having any revolutionary agency and in a lack of any nostalgia for any of the supposed verities of ‘workers’ power’. communization posits a proletariat that negates itself as an element of capitalism through a crisis of the reproductive cycle that entwines capital and proletariat together. Such a symmetrical opposition between a positively defined proletariat and the capitalist class risks simply replacing the management of capitalism through the exercise of force. etc. the thesis of ‘programmatism’ is nuanced by also
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. It’s more a case of strangling both proletariat and capital as reciprocal elements of the constraints of this reproductive cycle. Instead. TC have traced the imbrication of capital within the particular forms that resistance might take in the present as communization.162 This has the added appetiser that the workers’ movement carried within itself its antagonist in the shape of a reconstitution of capitalism in the very form its resistance takes – the valorization of the proletariat.Strategies of Struggle reproduction of capitalism.

Likewise. The decomposition of ‘programmatism’ and the accompanying shift from a proletariat that sought to valorize itself to confronting itself as a limit is also a shift in how to conceptualize destruction. Communization in this sense remains a speculative wager as to a slow and uneven process of proletarian dis-identification and revolt being produced through capital’s own often abortive attempts at self-valorization..164 There’s a suggestive hint in Theory of the Subject that through its emphasis upon the destruction of ‘splace’ – the place that produces proletarian subjectivity – that Badiou
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. as well as attempts to formalise post-Seattle anticapitalism. But negation as destruction can itself be periodized and contextualised. for that matter.Communization and its Discontents being an attempt to understand the present through the past in order to understand what – if anything – is possible in the present. 163 Badiou serves as a place marker for the cycles of anticapitalist resistance that the theorization of communization also emerged from. In a particularly singular register his experience and responses encapsulate both the post-’68 milieu that entered into conflict with the ‘old’ workers’ movement. regarding negation as a subordinate process in the affirmation and creation of the new. the question of representation and the state is dissolved through this since there’s nothing to ‘represent’ within a process of communization. With this negation as destruction is an involution of itself as any opposition to capital ultimately necessitates a dissolution of being proletariat. figure – the philosopher Alain Badiou. In his work he traces the link between destruction and negation.] such is the necessary – and prolonged – proletarian statement’. antagonistic. He had his own moment of valorizing destruction as a post-’68 Maoist in his work Theory of the Subject (1982): ‘Destroy [. It represents a break with both the remnants of the ‘old’ workers movement and other strands of ‘anticapitalism’ in the present almost as much as it posits a break with capital. This periodization of destructive negation can be compared with another.. Communization isn’t predicated upon the affirmation of any existent aspect of capitalism such as the proletariat or. nebulous entities such as the ‘multitude’.

and is associated by Badiou with the politics of the ‘passion for the real’ of the left revolutionary and artistic movements of the 20th century. Badiou centers it on ‘subtraction’ as a communism of withdrawal into the construction of a ‘minimal difference’ – an emancipatory politics ‘subtracted’ from economics and the state.165 It is the exhaustion of this sequence.. for Badiou. Destruction is posited as an ‘indefinite task of purification’ towards a ‘real’ obscured by ideology. etc. capitalism. However. it replaces this with its own alternative militant forms that elide the problem of negation. Tracing Badiou’s shifting response to the aporia of the decomposition of ‘programmatism’ we find a shift from a politics of destruction. outlined in the 1970s and early 1980s. ‘Subtraction’ carefully inscribes limits into what is achievable. While subtraction as a communism of withdrawal tries to avoid the ‘repressive consciousness’ of a reified negation. The theoretical praxis of communization upsets Badiou’s schema of a passage from destruction to subtraction. and it would be a
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. as with much post-’68 leftism there’s a tension in Theory of the Subject that strains against the limits of ‘programmatism’ but still collapses back into some form of the party.Strategies of Struggle shares something with early formulations of communization. this means yet more supposedly ‘autonomous’ spaces and militant but post-Bolshevik forms of organization. that leads him towards ‘subtraction’ as the attempt to avoid the ‘disaster’ of an overidentification with the necessarily violent aspect of negation. Practically. and instead to emphasize negation as a creative process. But this ‘subtractive’ anticapitalism also constitutes one of the limits of the present that communization is attempting a highly-contingent exit from. Reformatting the shape of radical politics in an unpropitious context. Badiou’s Maoism – an ideology that seems almost parodic in the present – led him at the time to tying revolutionary subjectivity into the radical subject of the ‘proletarian’ party rather than a more diffuse proletarian resistance. to a new theorization of ‘subtractive’ communism from the later 1980s to the present.

succinctly defined by Étienne Balibar as the ‘violence of economics and the economics of violence. violence and power within the social field of capitalism. disciplinary welfare systems. One of the conditions for the exit from the present posited through communization is recognition of our embedding in the wider economy of violence that constitutes capitalism. Real Abstract Violence Capitalism has its own forms of structural violence.Communization and its Discontents mistake to identify communization with an outdated politics of destruction. Gewalt encompasses both the legitimised force and violence of the state. needing-hating wage labor. Communization’s positing of the eradication of the very predicates of capitalism is embedded within the recognition that a ‘subtractive’ communism of the kind Badiou touts is an impossibility when all social relations are mediated through capital. They come together in both the coercion – subtle or otherwise – necessary for the reproduction of capitalism as a social relation and in periods
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. multifaceted term that describes the immanence of force. Gewalt is an ambiguous. always at hand to coercively ensure exploitation continues. etc. From the perspective of communization Badiou’s formal distinction collapses as destruction and subtraction are in fact so closely intertwined as to be indistinguishable – new forms of social relations being produced directly through the antiproductivist destruction of capitalism.’166 Such a violence is the Gewalt of capital. and the violence implicit in the process of proletarianization that’s the result of labor being abstracted from bodies and intellect as labor power. that make me think ‘make total destroy’ needs to be considered as a component of communization. getting miserable wages and wondering if you ever get retired…’167 It’s this definition of ‘violence’. A slogan that thought and acted with the event of the Greek uprising in 2008 is succinct about this: ‘VIOLENCE means working for 40 years. This violence of state and capital are analogous but not identical. This is a Gewalt that communization as destructive negation needs to be situated within. along with precarity.

Gewalt as the telos of history or just reciprocal force. There’s no need to follow Balibar into his reappraisal of Gandhi and some notion of ‘civilization’ – whatever that might mean – to recognize the pertinence of discovering an oppositional Gewalt that doesn’t reproduce the structural constraints of the force and violence of capitalism. Whether revolt should be ‘civilizing’ or a new kind of barbarism seems beside the point. ‘human rights’ remain inscribed within the logic of Gewalt and are constitutive of it.168 Gewalt is in no way a fault or objective failure within capitalism as might be supposed by liberals but an exception that’s always already included within it as essential to its functioning. Balibar’s erudite genealogical study of Gewalt in Marx and anticapitalism revolves around the ambiguities implicit in any use of Gewalt.Strategies of Struggle of primitive accumulation. as Benjamin notes defeated subjects are ‘accorded rights even when the victors superiority in power is complete’. Even in oppositional anticapitalist forms it could just be the reproduction of a symmetrical relation of force and violence that remains within capitalism. Balibar ends with a question of how to ‘civilize’ the revolution and step out of a systemic use of force and violence. More than this. The question of choosing between ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarism’ isn’t one that’s really posed to those caught within the Gewalt of capitalism. This is embodied in the instrumentality of such violence whether capitalist or anticapitalist. An oppositional Gewalt would be one that irrevocably broke this systemic violence and there’s no need to enter into the ethical labyrinth of how ‘civilizing’ this needs to be in order to break with such an emptied out ‘progress’. Violence within capitalism isn’t just the coercive police violence of the state but also acts through the abstractions – such as money and value
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. The Gewalt within capitalism maintains itself as a ghostly systemic presence even if often unacknowledged or elided by many states in favour of a language of formal ‘human rights’. Civilization and associated terms such as progress and humanism have long carried the baggage for nothing much more than the extraction of value from laboring bodies.

TC write in the Glass Floor. Capital creates its own wastelands in order to perpetuate itself and attempts to manage its own crises through generalizing them into a general crisis of social reproduction.Communization and its Discontents – that constitute it as a social relation. the wage and the reproduction of labor-power tend to become illegitimate for capital itself. factories and infrastructure – and labor power.. While violence has its own abstraction within capitalism its actual effects are anything but. the ‘real’ and ideology. Such real abstractions dissolve the boundaries between concrete and abstract.. In a sense the state and less ‘abstract’ aspects of domination are mediated through the value-form as the state plays its role within this. As Postone writes ‘the expenditure of labor power is not a means to another end.’170 The cop that beats demonstrators. but also in that apparently more tenuous one of abstract and impersonal rule. as a means has become an end’. In terms of the totality of capitalism this ‘end’ is also in itself a process towards the realization of surplus-value for capital.’172
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. the supposedly ‘creative destruction’ of fixed capital – technology. not only in the sense of brutal force. but it’s not quite as simple as a pure instrumentality of violence. or more simply people.169 Luca Basso writes that Marx’s conceptualization of Gewalt encapsulates ‘the idea of a violent subjection. This is the crisis of reproduction.171 The ‘end’ is the undead becoming of capital itself. but. Gewalt intertwines both capital and the state in an endlessly repeated accumulation of resources and the reproduction of the existent social relation. the running out of future. a recent text on the Greek uprising: ‘Absurdly. subjective and objective. the monthly wage – or lack of it – and the overall mediation of human relations through value are all aspects of Gewalt. But what happens when this reproductive cycle begins to break down? Capitalism has its own ‘make total destroy’ in the shape of the devalorization. As such this is always a means to this specific end. an ever self-perpetuating inhuman subject that overdetermines all other forms of life.

positing itself upon its own over accumulation in packages of debt and attempting to unchain itself from labor-power as a basis for the accumulation of surplus value.Strategies of Struggle We have the double spectre of runaway capitalism.
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.174 The destructive negation of communization is an attempt to grasp the possibilities within this moment. and so risks freezing ‘wageless life’ into an eternally fixed condition. and so our ability to even reproduce ourselves as its subjects. but as the positing of a different means without end to capital’s attempt to posit itself as an endlessly reproducing self-valorizing process. the decomposition of class. Michael Denning has suggested that the paradigm to understand capital is that of a ‘wageless life’ predicated upon the reproduction of informal and precarious forms of labor whether in shanty towns or the advanced sectors of the capitalist economy. and the mutually the imbricated reproductive cycles of capital and labor. It’s very much in this sense that communization contains the necessity of destruction and traces its possibilities through it – not as the acceleration of capital’s catastrophism. Rather than somehow stepping out of the immanent Gewalt of capitalism – an impossibility – communization might be seen as an oppositional praxis that turns this Gewalt against itself. it does capture what’s at stake in this reproductive crisis. The other reciprocal spectre is that of a unilateral uncoupling by capital of our ability to ‘enjoy’ the suffering of the violence of the wage relation. The classic response of the Left would be an attempt to reinstitute wage labor as a precondition for social reproduction. One is the spiral of capital becoming fictitious. but communization as a theoretical praxis is intertwined with and inhabits the contemporary nexus of devalorization. His linking of ‘wageless life’ to Marx’s characterisation of the free laborer as a ‘virtual pauper’ always potentially surplus to capitals requirements expresses not so much the objective decadence of capitalism but rather its continual restructuring.173 Whereas Denning argues that this was possibly always the case.

So. in that as it approaches production there’s still a drift towards the affirmation of work and proletarian identity. A ‘pure means’ would only find its justification within its own activity and would change social relations without being affixed to an ‘end’ or any particular teleology. no longer enforced by the state’. In some ways Benjamin inevitably remains very much of his time. He made a distinction between a ‘mythic’ violence subordinated to the ‘legal’ ends of the state and a ‘divine’ or ‘sovereign’ violence that was decoupled from the question of ends. even while breaking out of the cycle of a violence that would always re-institute the state. Conversely the ‘proletarian general strike’ would show an ‘indifference to a material gain through conquest’ and result in what Benjamin termed a ‘wholly transformed work. within this formulation there’s a trace of what a communizing Gewalt might be. The concept of a ‘sovereign violence’ is theorized through the distinction made by the syndicalist Sorel between the ‘political’ strike and the ‘proletarian general strike’. It is in this sense that ‘pure
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. against the quantitative ‘end’ of the realization of surplus value as a process in itself such a ‘pure means’ posits the possibility of a self-perpetuating Gewalt that breaks with the exigencies of value production. The former is a legitimised violence over pay and conditions. Even so. In conceptualizing the ‘proletarian general strike’ Benjamin pushed against these limits and arrived at a point of mapping a violence that would be a ‘pure means’. and even at its most radical it only results in a new ‘law’ or state overseen by the representatives of the workers.175 In a sense this is the limit of Benjamin’s then contemporary example of the syndicalist ‘proletarian general strike’.Communization and its Discontents Pure Means The problematic of means and ends preoccupied Walter Benjamin in his essay ‘Critique of Violence’ in what initially seems a different register from that of capitals self-positing Gewalt. Benjamin’s deconstruction of the aporia of a state based Gewalt and his ascent – or descent – into a theology of ‘sovereign violence’ seems like an unpromising place to formulate the very different problematic of communization.

and so ‘sovereign violence’ retains the sense of an unmediated violence. whether through workplace theft or simply not working when at work. Also. What Benjamin described as the weakened ‘pure means’ of the political strike is in fact a product of an attempt to forestall wider practices of sabotage. In another register he links ‘pure means’ to a mob violence that institutes its own justice outside of the norms of law. a purely subjective and voluntarist break with capitalism. The redefinition of the very notion of violence as it secedes from the Gewalt of capitalism means that it is no longer ‘violence’ but a cessation of the dynamics of violence through the ‘proletarian general strike’ – a blockade and sabotage of the economic violence of capitalism that circulates materials. ‘pure means’ is an ambiguous concept in Benjamin’s thought. bodies and commodities in order to produce value. However. and not an oppositional break with it. but such a violence is simultaneously mediated through capital as a negation while breaking with it – such a ‘pure
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. While this at least breaks apart any neat conceptual sophistries that deny the violence internal to ‘pure means’. as he writes: ‘Did not workers previously resort at once to sabotage and set fire to factories?’176 But more significantly. given that all violence is mediated through the Gewalt of capital the suggestion of such an unmediated violence loses something of the kind of rupture suggested by the ‘proletarian general strike. it leaves it reduced to remaining trapped as nothing but the expression of tensions within a capitalist Gewalt. as the violent rupture of ‘pure means’ becomes a vitalist anarchism.’ Not that this is necessarily non-violent in its totality. This discomforting association suggests to me a limitation in Benjamin’s thought.Strategies of Struggle means’ suggests an oppositional Gewalt as a decomposition of the binary structure of the violence that would lead to the reinstitution of a new state that it relates to communization. It’s tempting to see a trace of this in the most petty – and often involuntary – blockages of the reproduction of capitalism. the reproductive crisis of the ‘double moulinet’ contains within it an involuntary break such as this when through crises the interlocking cyclical shredding of human material pulls apart.

Comparing his body to the factory he imagines the production of feces as being akin to the production of commodities and his own mind as being capital. The production process of the factory and his own bodily identity as proletarian constitute the same limit and have the same result – shit. wherein value is abolished. production as production – machinery. It’s worth staying with Agamben’s parodic image of shit as emblematic of capitalist production in order to elaborate upon production and ‘pure means’. At the beginning of Elio Petri’s 1971 film The Working Class Goes to Heaven the main protagonist – a heroically hard-working factory worker – discusses production in the same terms as Agamben but more astutely.Communization and its Discontents means’ or ‘sovereign violence’ would be expressed in its social form as both a continuous process and in its actual expression as Gewalt. technology and bodies producing value through work – remains under-theorized within the philosophical discourse of ‘pure means’.177 This violence would be embedded in more than the activity of a radical minority and be a rupture with the social relations that constitute the Gewalt of capital. Giorgio Agamben – who has extrapolated from Benjamin’s initial formulation – only discusses production and ‘pure means’ when he relates production to the act of shitting.
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. In one sense a purely negative anthropology underpins communization. ‘one can’t distinguish between the activity of strikers and insurgents. Proletarianization is experienced as a constitutive lack. He writes humorously that ‘feces are a human production like any other’. a hollowing out predicated upon exploitation rather than any positive political identity. and the creation of other relations between individuals’.178 before more seriously arguing for a collective ‘profanation’ of the products of capitalism since an individual one would be ‘parodic’. ‘Pure means’ would then be expressed through a decoupling of proletarian social reproduction from the reproduction of capital through a very material process that would dismantle both the capitalist productive apparatus and the subjective limits that it imposes upon forms of life. However. TC note that in such an interconnected process.

except it’s in the form of a devalorization that breaks the existent social relation. The anti-productivist imperative of communization constitutes a ‘make total destroy’. Gratuity could be a ‘pure means’ in insurrectionary activity in the present – as with proletarian shopping – but the notion could also be intensified as a broader and more intense negation: The attack against the capitalist nature of the means of production is tantamount to their abolition as value absorbing labor in order to valorize itself. in that the negative import of the present is unfolded into a transformation of social relations. The notion of gratuity in the work of TC and Bruno Astarian brings together ‘pure means’ and communization in a way that can be grasped in the present. it is the extension of gratuity. In the present this is much more easily apprehended in the negative. which is projected as the resolution and negation of the Gewalt of capitalism. but this hollowed out substratum reduced to abstract labor exists in a tension with a potenzia that isn’t some vitalist essence but a negative potentiality more revealed through the destructive negation of these limits as a communizing pure means. the potentially physical destruction of certain means of production. their abolition as factories in which the product is defined as product.Strategies of Struggle Communization is the anti-product of this constitutive lack. This is the more speculative side of communization. as we remain inevitably trapped within a Gewalt defined through capitalism. In the shape of anti-productivism the theoretical praxis of communization directly approaches the conjunction of ‘pure means’ and a destructive negation that mirrors the devalorization of capital.179 The theoretical praxis of communization postulates an active destruction
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. The speculative theorization of this as ‘gratuity’ suggests it carries a hidden cargo that’s the dissolution of the subjective limits of the existent social relation through the collapse of the ‘double moulinet’. Gratuity is the forcible appropriation of commodities on the basis of need and their subsequent destruction as commodities.

Those shiny assemblages of enticing commodities and the harsher realities of assembly line production that dominate our world would not just be appropriated or placed under a new ‘anticapitalist’ management. Bruno
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. The closed loop of the capitalized subject opens out into a collective and individual resistance that’s intent upon discovering new ways of satisfying the means of social reproduction. as well as opening up. offices. Bruno Astarian writes in a much more speculative register that: ‘Gratuity is gratuity of the activity (in the sense that its productive result is secondary). This would be an asymmetrical move out of an anticapitalist resistance that remains caught within defending such sites in the present out of our necessity to exist within capitalism.’180 In gratuity there’s an expenditure of force unrelated to the ‘economic’ as factories. destroying and distributing what was previously constrained within exchange-value. and commodities as part of a transformation of social relations. It dissolves the boundaries between production and social reproduction in a re-inscription of ‘pure means’ as a negation of the mediation of the value-form. are torn away from their place as sites for the reproduction of capitalism. or any object whatsoever. technologies. This is a negation that decomposes the apparatuses that comprise a capitalist Gewalt. universities. It is freedom of access to one’s living conditions (including the means of “production” and “consumption”). etc. Astarian argues that such insurrectionary activity is productive of new forms of subjectivity predicated upon a disaffiliation with being proletarian. Simultaneously. The very notion of ‘product’ and ‘production’ would be trashed in this process and replaced by the realization of social relations no longer trapped under the object of realizing value. Gratuity would be the strongest expression of ‘pure means’ as an activity that was founded upon itself and expresses nothing but this.Communization and its Discontents through the seizure of factories. ‘Gratuity’ is a communizing Gewalt that breaks with the coercive structural violence of capitalism that’s reiterated through the imposition of a crisis in social reproduction.

but within the theoretical praxis of communization is less to do with this than with the way productive forces as determined by capital feed back into the exploitation. wherein material production is secondary to the transformation of social relations.182 and ‘Make total destroy’ would be the inversion of the productive apparatus into a means of producing new social relations. This could be linked to simply fetishizing the destruction of technology.Strategies of Struggle Astarian extends this to the notion of a ‘production without production’. Perhaps the utopian Fourier is the hidden referent and underpinning of all this negation and destruction – as Pierre Klossowski wrote ‘Fourier envisaged an economy of abundance resulting […] in the free play of passions’. Compared to the emphasis upon the ‘progressive’ role of the forces of production and their restraint by the relations of production in more traditional Marxism communization does present a break. or perhaps more accurately a destruction that negates the constraining mesh of exchange value and subjects existing forms to a communizing relation without measure. The anti-productivism of gratuity could be taken as communization being a utopia of machine-breakers and bring it uncomfortably close to some form of primitivism. Acknowledging this is a good way of avoiding Benjamin’s occasional mysticism about ‘sovereign violence’ as not being recognisable in the profane world. As Dauvé notes communization dissolves the ‘dictatorship of production relations over society’. An anti-productivist destruction as ‘pure means’ can only be apprehended as a negative image of the present – the potential breaking of the limits of existent capitalism. The projected
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. The Limits of Pure Means Conceptualizing communization in terms of ‘pure means’ also demonstrates its limits in the present. 181 A productive relation based around affect and the passions sounds impossibly utopian but given that contemporary spectacular capitalism is partially driven by instrumentalizing affect and ‘the passions’ it might not be so utopian to imagine the opposite.

’ Even if such activity is engaged in the crises around social reproduction it remains trapped within the already established circulation of commodities. though it’s a weakened. For instance.183 Negation is inscribed within ‘pure means’. ‘sacred’ commodities that define contemporary consumer capitalism. is a ‘pure means’ in that it produces new ways for people to relate to one another outside of exchange as well as being an improvised response to the pressures of social reproduction by playfully voiding the act of consumerism. money and other shit within capitalism. a Gewalt as ‘pure means’ might be embodied in the present within a praxis that refuses to demand anything and refuses to enter into the paradigm of ‘human rights’. or en masse looting of shops. A limit to this is that ‘no demands’ can become a demand in itself and reinstitute a ‘repressive consciousness’ amongst a radical minority. For instance.Communization and its Discontents anti-productivist destruction that communization would take is mediated negatively through capital.185
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.184 It doesn’t penetrate the ‘glass floor’ of production identified by TC as a limit to contemporary resistance. Agamben’s emphasis upon détournement suggests the way that even the concept of violence might shift in a praxis of ‘pure means’. This improvisational quality may even be its main advantage over the more symmetrical forms of a classic application of Gewalt. Giorgio Agamben’s elaboration of ‘pure means’ is that it’s the ‘creation of a new use [made] possible only by deactivating an old use. rendering it inoperative’. but a ‘pure means’ in the present is only ever a trace of this. But détournement might also be the limit of Agamben’s notion of ‘pure means. playful negation that reveals itself through any act that is a détournement of the apparatuses of social control. ‘No demands’ can only be a trace of the generalised ‘no demand’ that would be communization. The self-reduction of prices. Such an activity is what Agamben terms a ‘profanation’ of the gilded. Just as the Gewalt inscribed within capitalism isn’t the pure application of brute force so a communizing Gewalt can’t be reduced to a violent insurrection. It’s also tempting to relate ‘pure means’ to phenomena such as the practice of ‘proletarian shopping’ that was common in Italy in the 1970s.

are reproduced through apparatuses composed of discourses. ‘Make Total Destroy’ emerges through the theoretical praxis of communization as always already filtered through the Gewalt of contemporary capitalism and it’s this that makes it a highly contingent negation. anti-political ‘pure means’ that could decompose and decelerate the antimonies of capitalist Gewalt awaits its realisation through the conditions that give rise to it. corresponding to the everyday and potentially blocking insurrection. institutions and technologies. Apparatuses reproduce a more uneven terrain of struggle that includes but can’t be reduced to production as a site of contestation.
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. This aporia will only be resolved through a praxis that disables the entire reproductive cycle of capital and what that would be remains an open question. as identities based around consumption.. ethnicity. work.Strategies of Struggle This is further complicated by a double bind of biopolitics wherein the lack of a subject defined through exploitation is mirrored by an almost parodic subjective plenitude. etc. An anti-productivist. sexuality.

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indissoluble bond between one man and one woman. the division of labor and private property.Communization and the Abolition of Gender Maya Andrea Gonzalez186
Present day civilization makes it plain that it will only permit sexual relationships on the basis of a solitary. the state. and that it does not like sexuality as a source of pleasure in its own right and is only prepared to tolerate it because there is so far no substitute for it as a means of propagating the human race.
. Communization abolishes the capitalist mode of production. since the unfolding contradictions of capitalism annihilated the conditions which other forms of revolution required. Sigmund Freud. a strategic perspective. Communization describes a set of measures that we must take in the course of the class struggle if there is to be a revolution at all. It is not a form of society we build after the revolution. exchange. That the revolution must take this form is a necessary feature of class struggle today. an organization. the value form. including wage-labor. or a plan. It is not a tactic. Our cycle of struggles can have no other horizon. Civilization and Its Discontents
Communization is not a revolutionary position. It is no longer possible to imagine a situation in which social divisions are dissolved after the revolution.

a winning strategy for the movements of the past says nothing about the present. The fact that revolution takes the form of communization is not the result of lessons learned from past defeats. Of course. inaugurating relations between individuals defined in their singularity. Wage-labor has become a universal condition of life as never before. Its relation to capital is precarious. workers still exist as a class. but because it is part of the totality of relations that daily reproduce the capitalist mode of production. the Multitude. communization must destroy gender in its very course. Gender.Communization and its Discontents Since the revolution as communization must abolish all divisions within social life. or the Precariat. A surplus population of over one-billion people – eager to find a place in the global commodity chains
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. it must also abolish gender relations – not because gender is inconvenient or objectionable. Its relevance to our existence will not be transformed slowly – whether through planned obsolescence or playful deconstruction. However. the proletariat is diffuse and fractured. Whether or not we can discern. On the contrary. after the fact. too. in order to be revolution at all. The capital-labor relation no longer allows workers to affirm their identity as workers and to build on that basis workers’ organizations capable of assuming power within the state. is constitutive of capital’s central contradiction. and so gender must be torn asunder in the process of the revolution. We cannot wait until after the revolution for the gender question to be solved. For capital no longer organizes a unity among proletarians on the basis of their common condition as wage-laborers. no affirmable identity – not the Worker. whether as the equality of gender identities or their proliferation into a multitude of differences. nor even from the miserable failure of past movements to solve the gender question. The real basis of any such revolutionary identity has melted away. The revolution as communization has no revolutionary subject. Movements that elevated workers to the status of a revolutionary subject were still ‘communist’. The structural oversupply of labor is enormous. but communist in a mode that cannot be ours today.

can no longer build its power as a class against capital. With the benefit of hindsight. fragments and more than ever relies on the divisions between workers. blacks. the Working Class.No Future? from which they have been excluded – makes it impossible to form mass organizations capable of controlling the supply of labor. we must assess the present state of the practical movement toward the end of gender relations. But that limit is at once the dynamic potential of this cycle of struggles. The revolution as communization does not solve this problem. except among the most privileged strata of workers. the theory of communization has been the product of a small number of groups organized around the publication of a handful of yearly journals. in its autonomy as a class within capitalism. It is no historical accident that the end of the former cycle of struggles coincided with a revolt against the primacy of the Worker – a revolt in which feminism played a major role. it is increasingly clear that if the working class (as a class of all those without direct access to means of production) was destined to become the majority of society. the revolution must emerge from the disunity of the proletariat. We must also expand discussion of this essential communizing measure.187 Capital now exacerbates. it is not communization. Today. then it is not revolutionary. but it takes it onto a new terrain. Until recently. as the only process capable of overcoming that disunity. Once the proud bearers of a universally relevant revolutionary essence. the very inability of workers to unite on the basis of a workers’ identity thus forms the fundamental limit of struggle. As surveyors of this new landscape. If revolutionary action does not immediately abolish all divisions between proletarians. bearing within itself the abolition of gender relations and all other fixed distinctions. and homosexuals to a subordinate position is to think a workers’ movement that lacks precisely the unifying/excluding trait that once allowed it to move at all. If few of those groups have taken up the task
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. the workers’ movement was unlikely to organize a clear majority from it. In the present moment. To re-imagine a workers’ movement that would not demote women.

the tendency organized around Théorie Communiste (TC) is unique. Workers burn down or blow up their factories. in going beyond the demands-based character of its struggle. the unemployed. the revolution as communization only emerges as a practical possibility when these struggles begin to ‘swerve’ (faire l’écart) as the very act of struggling increasingly forces the proletariat to call into question and act against its own reproduction as a class. and the multiplication of these gaps is itself the practical possibility of communism in our time. they have busied themselves with trying to discover a revolutionary secret decoder-ring. demanding severance pay instead of fighting to maintain their jobs. rather than from a focus on the historical specificity of the present. making the limited nature of the latter’s demands at once obvious and impossible to sustain. In the face of these proliferating gaps in the struggle. the youth. but they arrived at this conclusion through an analysis of what communization would have to be in order to succeed where past movements failed.Communization and its Discontents of theorizing gender. and we largely follow them in our exposition. with which they might be able to decipher the merits and shortcomings of past struggles. most partisans of communization have thought the revolution as an immediate overcoming of all separations. For TC. On the contrary. will take communizing measures and will thus initiate
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. but against rather than in the name of the demands for which they are supposedly fighting. Thus. since those movements cannot but fail to represent them. And everywhere. a fraction of the proletariat. Women break with movements in which they already form a majority. Students occupy universities. and the undocumented join and overwhelm the struggles of a privileged minority of workers. it is because most have been wholly uninterested in examining the real basis of the divisions that mark the existence of the working class. ‘Gaps’ (l’écarts) thereby open up in the struggle.188 For this reason.

most of their ideas can be reconstructed in a clear fashion. was finally published in 2010 (with two additional appendices) in issue 23 of their journal as Distinction de Genres. Their main text on gender.e. How ever. TC claim that communization involves the abolition of gender as much as the abolition of capitalist social relations. For the divisions which maintain capitalism maintain the gender division and the gender division preserves all other divisions. with some effort. Perhaps that is why TC. as it is perhaps the most fundamental divisions within the proletariat. we refrain from lengthy quotations. Since their work on gender is provisional. they end up doing little more than suture gender to an already existing theory of the capitalist mode of production (to no small extent.No Future? the unification of the proletariat which will be the same process as the unification of humanity. Still. especially for a group which has spent the last thirty years refining and restating a few key ideas over and over again. TC’s work on gender is relatively new. have devoted themselves to an examination of the gender distinction. alone among theorists of communization. as much as TC take steps towards developing a rigorously historical materialist theory of the production of gender. Programmatisme et Communisation. this is because they rely largely on the work on one important French feminist. but also the very source of that overcoming. written in 2008. TC are known for their esoteric formulations. its creation as the ensemble of social relations that individuals establish between themselves in their singularity. the divisions within the proletariat are therefore not only that which must be overcome in the course of the revolution. TC have a particularly fascinating theory of communization insofar as it is also a periodization of the history
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. i. For our context here. Christine Delphy190).189 For TC.

woman and man – and not only female and male – is inseparable.Communization and its Discontents of class struggle – which itself corresponds to a periodization of the history of the capital-labor relation. The very category of woman is organized within and through a set of social relations. this circumscription of the women’s realm means that not only are their bodies appropriated by men. all bodies that could conceivably ‘produce’ babies are subject to social regulation. Crucially.191 Sexual difference is given this fixed significance within class societies. The Construction of the Category ‘Woman’ Woman is a social construction. as much as their very being. sexual difference is given a particular social relevance that it would not otherwise possess. and in particular the only people capable of owning property. In this way. Women thereby became the property of society as a whole. This provides TC with a uniquely historical vantage on the present prospects for communism. Class society thus gives a social purpose to bodies: because some women ‘have’ babies. This change of focus allows them to bring within their purview the set of relations that actually construct capitalist social life – beyond the walls of the factory or office. Over the long history of class society. I. In this way. And the gender relation has always extended beyond the sphere of value production alone. women were born into a world organized only for men – the primary ‘actors’ in society. This labor is defined not as work done in the home. but also the totality of their activity. in the sexual reproduction of the species. For TC. rather than on the production of value. is by definition ‘private’. Because women are by definition not men. but as women’s
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. they are excluded from ‘public’ social life. Women become the slaves of the biological contingencies of their birth. for a period of their lives. women’s activity takes on the character of domestic labor. from which the splitting of humanity into two. TC focus on the reproduction of the capital-labor relation. Their activity. when the category of woman comes to be defined by the function that most (but not all) human females perform.

The augmentation of the population as the primary productive force remains. The question now becomes. The social division between these groups is constitutive of the relations of production. and in fact the social relevance of women’s role in sexual reproduction changes with the mode of production. we should remind ourselves that the special burden of
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. Crucially. That does not mean that relations between men and women are derivative of the relations between the classes. women are the primary productive force within all class societies. Of course. including perhaps their ‘production’ of children. the burden of its women. However. more dignified social entity. If a woman sells cloth in the market. Is the unpaid labor of women for men. she is only a wife. which organize the productive forces for the purpose of producing and extracting surplus. she is a weaver. these relations must have as their product the reproduction of the class relation itself. for TC – and we follow them on this point – each mode of production is already a totality. how do we unite our story about women with our story about the succession of modes of production? For TC. The gender distinction man/woman thereby takes on additional significance as public/private and social/domestic. which then relates to the class-based system. but if she makes cloth in the home. It means rather that the relations between men and women form an essential element of the class relation and cannot be thought as a separate ‘system’. or even a mode of production (as Delphy calls it. However. since the growth of the population forms an essential support of the reproduction of the class relation. the domestic mode of production)? TC defines class society as a relationship between surplus producers and surplus extractors. the heterosexual matrix is founded on a specific set of material social relations. throughout the history of class society. therefore a class relation. without any of the concrete determinations it would be given if it were performed by some other.No Future? work. A woman’s activity is thus considered merely as her activity. this discussion remains abstract. In this way.

each woman had to give birth. for the slaves. since slaves exist entirely within the private realm. there was never any ‘natural’ regime of human sexual reproduction. For this reason. Historically. there is some evidence that patriarchy was. For both men and women slaves. social acceptability of infanticide – all have varied across human social formations. number of children born. The chance that a woman would die in childbirth. such as taxation.193 Their variation marks a unique adaptability of the human species.Communization and its Discontents childbirth predates the advent of class society. but rather only to give up a part of its product to the lords. rather weak among slave families in the American South. was nearly one in ten. by contrast. length of breastfeeding. which is itself a site of both production and reproduction. peasant families remain relatively independent of markets.192 Perhaps the insight of TC is that the advent of class society – which saw a massive increase in the size of the human population – hardened the social relevance of these facts. Age at marriage.194 In vassalage. The reproduction or upkeep of slaves is the direct responsibility of the slave owner himself. Wage-labor is fundamentally different from both ancient slavery and feudal vassalage. Women and children peasants are confined to the private realm of the village. to six children – just in order to ensure that two of those six survived to reproduce the coming generations. Surplus is extracted by force. The peasant man stands in relation to this outside force as the public representative of the peasant household. on average.
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. But even before the advent of class society. Interestingly. the distinction between public and private thus dissolves. in the course of her life. But we are concerned less with the long history of the human species than with the history of the capitalist mode of production. of property inheritance or relations with the state. the surplus producers have direct access to the means of production. For the slaves are themselves part of the means of production. Property passes through his line. Nor is there any question. In slavery. surplus producers have no ‘relation’ to the means of production. The peasant family does not need to leave its private sphere in order to produce what it needs. perhaps for that very reason.

The home becomes the sphere of private activity – that is. Of course. At this point the public/ private distinction takes on a spatial dimension. What the workers earn for socially performed production in the public realm. domestic sphere of reproduction (where little production takes place unmediated by commodities purchased on the market) is constitutive of capitalist social relations as such. the lives of the surplus producers are constitutively split between the public production of a surplus and the private reproduction of the producers themselves. The existence of a separate. unlike the vassals. For TC. The reproduction of the workers is thus emphatically not the responsibility of the capitalist. The binaries of public/private and social/domestic are embodied in the wage-relation itself. The workers. Here is the essence of the capital-labor relation. Production for exchange. Indeed.No Future? In capitalism. If wages are too low. they must spend in order to reproduce themselves domestically in their own private sphere. which was formerly performed inside the home. women’s domestic labor and men’s ‘free time’ – while the factory takes charge of the public. women have also always been wage laborers. again and again. increasingly leaves the home to be performed elsewhere. alongside men. these binaries will only collapse with the end of capitalism. the workers can take care of their own upkeep only if they return to the labor market. or if their services are no longer needed. However. unlike the slaves. the gendered nature of
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. For if the capitalists were directly responsible for workers’ survival – and thus if their reproduction were removed from the private sphere – then the workers would no longer be compelled to sell their labor-power. workers are ‘free’ to survive by other means (as long as those means are legal). to find work. Social activity separates out from domestic activity as the market becomes the mediating mechanism of concrete social labor performed outside of the home. socially productive character of men’s work. are their ‘own property’: they continue to exist only if they take care of their own upkeep. for as long as capitalism has existed.

low-wage jobs. The fact that women’s work is of a particular character outside the home is merely true by analogy to the character of the work they perform in the home. apparel and electronics assembly. there are at least some women in all sectors of the economy. When women work in factories. particularly in textiles. The sexual segregation of work in the capitalist mode of production is directly related to the temporality of a woman’s life: as the bearer of children. largely. why do they remain almost entirely female? As TC begin to discuss capitalism. Women tend to work in part-time. once gender becomes embodied in the wage-relation as a binary public/private relation. they phase out their focus on sexual reproduction. This oversight is a serious mistake. TC increasingly define the work that women do in the home by its character as the daily reproductive labor performed necessarily outside of the sphere of production – and not by relation to the role that women play in childbirth. they are segregated into labor-intensive jobs requiring delicate hand-work. By the same token. women are and have always been both wage-laborers and domestic laborers. within the capitalist mode of production. including among the highest paid professionals). or else in their offices and airplanes. even if men perform it – which. If. work done in the home remains women’s work. even when performed outside of the home. as the ‘principal force of production’. Likewise. the main source of their nourish228
. they do not. In this sense. namely unproductive or else low valueadded labor. it is more or less ideological. It bears no relation to the material ground of women’s role in sexual reproduction. that is to say. remains merely women’s work. wage labor of a particular sort. TC cease to theorize its ground in the role that women play in sexual reproduction. which disappears under a materially unfounded conception of domestic labor (though their references to biology return later.Communization and its Discontents women’s domestic work determines that their work. Women often perform domestic services in other people’s homes. particularly in services (though of course today. It remains. and in that sense. as we will see).

Over the long history of capitalism. and their primary caretakers through puberty. women’s participation in the labor market has followed a distinct ‘M-shaped’ curve.No Future? ment at young ages (breastfeeding). more and more women return to the labor market (or move to full-time work). Beyond that. There thus remains a strong pressure on women. Young women look for full-time work. as workers either not expected to remain on the job for very long or else as older. until after World War II. The existence of a distinctive place for women in the labor force then reinforces a society-wide commitment to and ideology about women’s natural place. de facto if not de jure excluded from many forms of property ownership. their participation in the labor force declines. widows and divorcées. but with the expectation that they will either stop working or work part-time when they have children. but at a distinct disadvantage in terms of skills and length of employment. at least as compared to the men with whom they compete for jobs.196 For all these reasons. then drops as women enter their late 20s and early 30s. The reasons for this pattern are well known. Even when both men and women work.195 Participation rises rapidly as women enter adulthood. Historically. or women whose husbands’ incomes are low or unreliable. this pressure was compounded by the fact that women were. expected to enter and leaving the workforce according to the cyclical needs of the capitalist enterprises. Participation slowly rises again as women enter their late 40s before dropping off at retirement ages. insofar as they are materially dependent on their husbands. to accept their subordination: to not ‘push too hard’197 on questions of the sexual division of labor within the home. When women enter childbearing years. men typically (at least until recently) earn higher wages and work longer hours outside the home. women form an important component of what Marx calls the ‘latent’ reserve army of labor. capitalist economies have always had a special ‘place’ for women workers. making them reliant
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. both in the home and at work. late entrants or re-entrants into the labor force. Women who continue to work while their children are young are among the poorer proletarians and are super-exploited: unmarried mothers. As children get older.

the capital-labor relation cannot accommodate the continued growth of the labor force. The ‘special dignity’ of their subordinate role was no longer dignified at all. women did not possess the juridical freedoms that male proletarians won for themselves – and not for their women. The response was ‘pro-natalism’.198 II. since women were no longer fulfilling their duty to the nation. By the 1970s. structurally excessive to its demands for labor. capital increasingly faces a large and growing surplus population. however – as the population of poor countries exploded while the capitalist economy entered into a protracted crisis – maternalism was largely dead. In an earlier moment birth-rates declined precipitously in Europe and the former European settler-colonies. capitalism increased work230
. that is only half the story. As we have already noted. even feminists became increasingly pro-natalist. Civilization supposedly faced imminent degeneration. they do have a provocative theory of how women’s situation within capitalism changes according to the unfolding contradictions of that mode of production. The appearance of this surplus population has coincided with a transformation in the way that capitalist states. Women were no longer needed in their role as women. and also feminists have viewed women as the ‘principal productive force’. turning maternalism into an explanation for women’s ‘equal but different’ dignity as compared to men. In the course of its early development. which TC fail to consider. Women were not truly ‘free’ labor in relation to the market and the state. in the present period. However. the workers’ movement. as were their male counterparts.Communization and its Discontents on men as mediators of their relation to capital. ‘Capitalism has a problem with women’ because. By the 1920s. The other half is to be found in the history of the demographic transition itself. The Destruction of the Category ‘Woman’ Though TC fail to explain the ground of the construction of women in capitalism. The world was overpopulated with respect to the demand for labor. Therefore. they had to be encouraged back into it.

for those who fit neither the categories of gender distinction. the ‘freedom’ that women have won (or are winning) from their reproductive fate has not been replaced with free-time.199 As with everything else in capitalism. the diminishing but still heavy burden of childbearing and domestic work. however. the increasingly primary role in their lives of wage-work – within which they remain. Simultaneously. However with time. At first. Thus. and on the other hand. both in the number of children each woman has and in the number of children who subsequently survive infancy and early childhood. They explain why. That some women choose not to have children at all – and thus to solve this dilemma for themselves. Falling infant mortality in turn reduced the number of children that each woman had to have in order to reproduce the species. there has been a subsequent reduction. since women are everywhere spending less time in childbirth and child-rearing. Women’s situation is thus increasingly split between. But now. As all women know. nor those of sexual difference). disadvantaged. reducing infant mortality. but with other forms of work. and now in almost every region of the world. as well as the desire. to a small extent. less of women’s lifetimes are spent either having or caring for young children. for men as well as women (and even. to have children. this situation expresses itself as a forced choice between the promise a working life supposedly equal to men and the pressure. in our period. Women’s supposed entrance into the labor force was always actually an increase in the time and duration of women’s already existing participation in wage-work. as both men and women live longer. The importance of these facts cannot be overestimated. this transformation appeared as an increase in the number of surviving children per woman and a rapid growth of the population. however inadequately – is the only possible explanation of
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.No Future? ers’ consumption and thereby improved their health. on the one hand. the spread of capitalist social relations was everywhere associated with an increase in women’s reproductive burden. there has been a reduction in the M-shaped nature of their participation in labor-markets. the straight-jacket of the heterosexual matrix has had its buckles slightly loosened.

This incompatibility of women and markets has plagued the women’s movement. since it was only through gender that women could affirm their identity as women in order to organize on that basis. it becomes increasingly clear that women have a problem with markets. Women workers are able to bear children and thus cannot be relied on not to have children. sexual difference cannot but appear as an additional cost.201 As a result. since markets are incompatible with women. In this situation. Women are thus relegated by capitalist relations – precisely because markets are sex-blind – to women’s wage-work. to the labor market. fertility has fallen from 6 children per woman in 1950 to around 2. the women’s movement has swung back and forth between two positions.Communization and its Discontents the fall in the birth rate below what is predicted by demographic transition theory. labor markets. must be ‘sex-blind’. In the world as a whole. It is because workers are responsible for their own upkeep that they are forced to return. take direct responsibility for the reproduction of the working class. capital cannot. if it is to remain capital. Fertility is now as low as 1. again and again. At the same time.202 On the one hand. For some employers. women fought for equality on the basis of their fundamental same232
.2 children per woman in Italy and Japan. This affirmation became a problem for the movement historically. since it is impossible to fully reconcile gender – the very existence of women and men – with the simultaneous existence of the working class and capital. sexual difference appears as a benefit for precisely the same reason: women provide flexible. Feminism historically accepted the gendered nature of social life. First. if they are to remain markets. almost everywhere else in the West it has fallen below 2.200 Markets have to evaluate the competition between workers without regard to any non-market characteristics of the workers themselves. For other employers.5 today. cheap labor. These non-market characteristics include the fact that half of all of humanity is sexed female. This incompatibility comes down to two facts about the capitalist mode of production.

and Bebel’s Woman and Socialism. Private Property and the State. amounted to
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. women and men are not and never will be the same for capital. knew how to keep women in their place. in addition to Marx’s Capital. were Engels’ Origins of the Family. is precisely the reason for women’s subordinate role. Both housework and childcare would be performed collectively by men and women together. As it became clear to the most extreme elements of the Radical Feminist movement in the 1970s. the workers’ movement betrayed its women as soon as it had the chance.204 How could it have been otherwise? Within a world defined by work – or more precisely. by productive labor (a category of capitalism) – women would always be less than men. here made explicit as motherhood.203 In fact. these measures would never suffice to actually ensure ‘real equality’ between men and women workers. male workers were fully willing to demonstrate their capacity to manage the economy by showing that they. the market. The workers’ movement promised to reconcile women and workers beyond. the workers movement would socialize women’s reproductive work ‘after the revolution’. The only possibility of achieving an equality of workers.No Future? ness with respect to men. the workers’ movement promised to bring women out of the home and into the workforce. at the intersecting limit of both gender and labor. within the bounds of capitalism. The attempt to do so. Whenever they came close to power. women have fought for equality on the basis of their ‘difference but equal dignity’ to men. On the other hand. too. After all. In order to achieve this real equality. The attempt to ‘raise’ women to the equals of men was always a matter of adjusting a ‘universally’ relevant movement of workers to fit the ‘particular’ needs of its women. where they would finally become the true equals of men. But that difference. finally having nothing to do with women at all. would be if babies were born in test-tubes. In the British Communist Party. or at least behind the back of. the founding texts of German Social Democracy. freeing husbands from domestic work was the main task of women’s ‘party work’. But whatever the similarity of their aptitudes. Through struggle.

And now. It is only from within this (and other) conflicts that the proletariat will come to see its class belonging as an external constraint. the presence of women within the class struggle can only function as a rift (l’ecart). They could have made women more of a priority than they did. But the ‘goal’ of the struggle lies elsewhere.Communization and its Discontents a minimal socialization of childcare. as well as the institution of a minimal set of laws protecting women from their disadvantages in markets (that is to say. an impasse which it will have to overcome in order to be anything at all beyond its relation to capital. Today. they form the majority of the participants. it’s over. Workers’ movements could have gone further along this road.
205
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. in any given case. therefore. etc). which destroys gender and all the other divisions that come between us. for diverting it from its primary goals. maternity leave. They will be criticized for derailing the movement. That struggle cannot be their struggle. In the course of struggle. even if. But the fact is that they did not. come into conflict with men. For as long as proletarians continue to act as a class. a deviation in the class conflict that destabilizes its terms. the women among them cannot but lose. women will. That overcoming is only the revolution as communization. The death of the workers’ movement has been considered in other texts. Its death marks also the passage from one historical form of revolution to another.

11
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Black Box, Black Bloc Alexander R. Galloway

Of all the revivals in recent years – a period of history in which the revival itself has been honed to such a degree that it persists as mere ‘blank parody’ – the revival of Hegel is the most startling, although certainly not for those involved. Hegelianisms of all shapes and sizes prevail today, from Catherine Malabou’s dutiful reconstruction of the ‘plastic’ dialectical transformations, to the hysterical antimaterialism of Slavoj Žižek and his convocation of the inescapable bind between the ‘determinate negation’ and the ‘wholly Other,’ from which explodes the terror of proletarian power. Is not Woody Allen’s character Alvy Singer in Annie Hall the perfect summation of Žižek’s political project: Okay I’m a bigot, but for the left! Or consider the unrepentant Hegelian Alain Badiou who stakes everything on being as a pure formalism that only ever realizes itself through the event, an absolute departure from the state of the situation. Only the Hegelian dialectic, and not the Marxist one, can snap back so cleanly to its origins like this, suggesting in essence that Aufhebung was always forever a spectralization and not a mediation in general, that in other words the ultimate truth of the Hegelian dialectic is spirit, not

Communization and its Discontents negation or becoming or anything so usefully mechanical. The negation is thus revoked during synthesis, much more than it is resolved. This would be one way to read the current intellectual landscape, as so many revoked materialisms, so many concepts too terrified by matter to matter. And so the question comes again, always again: is the dialectic a medium, or does the dialectic demonstrate the absolute impossibility of any kind of mediation whatsoever? What is the status of the obscure, of negation, of the dark corners of being that are rarely ever subsumed by dialectical becoming, or even strategically excluded from it? Where are we now? In an essay from 2001, the French collective Tiqqun speaks of what they call the cybernetic hypothesis: ‘[A]t the end of the twentieth century the image of steering, that is to say management, has become the primary metaphor to describe not only politics but all of human activity as well.’206 The cybernetic hypothesis is, in Tiqqun’s view, a vast experiment beginning in the overdeveloped nations after World War II and eventually spreading to swallow the planet in an impervious logic of administration and interconnectivity. ‘The cybernetic hypothesis is thus a political hypothesis, a new fable... [It] proposes that we conceive of biological, physical and social behaviour as both fully programmed and also re-programmable.’207 The essay is interesting not so much for Tiqqun’s description of the late twentieth century, a description of cybernetic society that has become increasingly common today. Rather it is interesting for how the collective describes the appropriate political response to such a hypothesis. They speak of things like panic, noise, and interference. They propose counterstrategies of hypertrophy and repetition, or as they put it ‘to execute other protocols.’208 Yet there is always a strategic obscurantism in their proscriptions, what Tiqqun calls here ‘invisible revolt.’ ‘It is invisible because it is unpre238

No Future? dictable to the eyes of the imperial system,’ they write, lauding the virtues of mist and haze: ‘Fog is the privileged vector of revolt ... Fog makes revolt possible.’209 Invisibility is not a new concept within political theory. But what I would like to explore here is a specific kind of invisibility, a specific kind of blackness that has begun to permeate cybernetic societies, and further that this blackness is not simply an effect of cybernetic societies but is in fact a necessary precondition for them. The black box: an opaque technological device for which only the inputs and outputs are known. The black bloc: a tactic of anonymization and massification often associated with the direct action wing of the left. Somehow these two things come together near the end of the twentieth century. Is there a reason for this? Close your laptop tight and what do you see? A smooth outer opaque shell, hiding and housing a complex electronic machine within. With the lid down, there is little with which to interact. Pick it up, put it down, not much more. Open it again and see the situation reversed: now concave, the external surface of the machine is no longer opaque and smooth, rather it is plastered over with buttons and sockets, speakers and screens, boxes and windows, sliders and menus, clicks and drags, taps and double taps. Splayed open, the box begs to be touched, it exists to be manipulated, to be interfaced. There are two kinds of black boxes. The first is the cipher and the second is the function. With the lid closed the laptop is a black box cipher. With the lid up, a black box function. The black box cipher was very common during modernity. Marx articulated the logic cleanly in Capital, vol. 1 with his description of the commodity as having both a ‘rational kernel’ and a ‘mystical shell.’ It is a useful device for Marx, portable and deployable at will whenever the
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Communization and its Discontents dialectic needs to be triggered. Thus the commodity is a black box cipher, but so is value, and so is the relationship between exchange and production, ditto for the class relation, and on and on. Superimpose the cipher and begin to decode. This is the ‘rational kernel, mystical shell’ logic at its most pure: untouched, the phenomena of the world are so many ciphers, so many mystical black boxes waiting to be deciphered to reveal the rationality (of history, of totality) harboured within. The black box cipher is similar to Leibniz’s monad. Like the monad, the cipher ‘has no windows.’ It is a cloaked node with no external connectivity. Think again of the laptop with its lid closed. The case is a turtle shell designed to keep out what is out and keep in what is in. This is what the commodity is, to be sure, but it is also what the sign is, what spectacle is, and what all the other cultural phenomena are that model themselves after the commodity logic. Interiority is all; interface is but a palliative decoy, a flourish added for people who need such comforts. But this is only one half of the story, a half that has served quite nicely for decades but nevertheless needs to be supplemented because, quite simply, the mode of production itself is now a new one with new demands, new systems, and indeed new commodities. If it could speak today, the black box would say: ‘Let us reconnect to the noisy sphere where everything takes place on the surface and in full view of everyone, for this is the plane of production, on whose threshold is already encoded a million mantras for the new economy: “Do what feels right.” “Reach out and touch someone.” “Play hard.” “Don’t be evil.”’ Fortified with a bright array of windows and buttons, the monad ceases to be a monad. It is still the old cipher, only now it has an interface. It is a cloaked node, one whose external connectivity is heavily managed.
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Seeking the origins of the black box. one that abdicated any requirement for penetration into the object in question. the Tizard Mission arrived in Washington. An emergency wartime diplomatic expedition. or an API (application programming interface). The new sciences of behaviourism. and therefore ‘black. DC on September 12. 1940 carrying vital items packaged inside of a black. Philipp von Hilgers recalls the year 1940 and the Battle of Britain. metal box with the hopes that American scientists could assist their British allies in developing new technologies for the war effort. which had been modified in recent years from a transparent glass housing to an opaque. the magnetron. in which objects were unveiled or denaturalized to reveal their inner workings – from Descartes’s treatise on method to both the Kantian and Marxian concepts of critique to the Freudian plumbing of the ego – was replaced by a new approach to knowledge.’ copper housing. a small microwave-emitting tube suitable for use in radar equipment. While its conceptual origins go back to Marx and the nineteenth century. the term ‘black box’ enters discourse proper in the 1940s via military tech slang. On a small scale the magnetron was a black box that allowed the Allies greater flexibility with their radar. but only selectively and under stricture of specific grammars of action and expression. but on a larger scale the confrontation of the war itself was a veritable black-box theatre in which enemy objects and messages were frequently intercepted and had to be decoded.No Future? Consider how a function works in computer languages.210 Inside the black box was another black box. preferring instead to keep the object opaque and to make all judgements based on the object’s
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. particularly the transport out of the country of some of Britain’s technical secrets via the so-called Tizard Mission. or a network socket. and what would soon be called cybernetics put in place a new black-box epistemology in which the decades if not centuries old traditions of critical inquiry. What is consistent across all these technologies is the notion that visibility should be granted. operations research. game theory.

its inputs and outputs. No one knew what they were supposed to do or how they were to do it. Warren McCulloch describes the black box at a meeting in Princeton during the winter of 1943-1944 attended by Norbert Wiener. Thus no attempt could be made to explore the innards of the second box. One must concentrate exclusively on the outside surface of the box. Any knowledge to be gained from the second box would have to be gained purely via non-invasive observation. Both had inputs and outputs. The point here is that because of these auto-destruct mechanisms. The box must stay closed. To avoid this. What shall we do?’211 War planes often contained technologies such as radar that should not fall into the hands of the enemy. The box must stay black. of course. in this hypothetical scenario. yet as this new
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. This is but one historical vignette. and no telling if there would ever be a chance to capture additional boxes with which to experiment. Box number two remained intact. Thus when McCulloch says. it was inadvisable if not impossible to open up devices (black boxes) gleaned from the enemy. The rational actor in a game theory scenario is a black-boxed actor. In short the behaviourist subject is a black-boxed subject. that the first black box exploded he is referring to the fact that its self-destruction mechanism had been triggered. The first box had been opened and [it] exploded. You always have to find out what it does and how it does it.Communization and its Discontents observable comportment. Walter Pitts and others: [We] were asked to consider the second of two hypothetical black boxes that the allies had liberated from the Germans. such technological devices were often equipped with self-destruction mechanisms. The question was phrased unforgettably: ‘This is the enemy’s machine. The node in a cybernetic system is a black-boxed node. so labelled. least risk a second explosion.

and code libraries. a piece of software. and black box their innards. our shells are keyboards.’212 It is thus today no longer a question simply of the enemy’s black box. and correctly. but the black boxing of the self.No Future? epistemological framework developed via what. our surfaces are interactive interfaces that selectively allow passage from the absolutely visible exterior to the absolutely opaque interior. data objects. RFC 950 on subnetting procedures puts this principle quite well:
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. The black box grew to become a constituent element of how entities and systems of entities were conceived. and related disciplines). These new black boxes are therefore labelled functions because they are nothing but a means of relating input to output. call this technique ‘obfuscation. the rational shell and the mystical kernel. a genetic sequence. a hospital patient.’ ‘Function’ black boxes include the computer. it is ourselves: a call center employee. of any node contained in a network of interaction. the protocol interface. neutral nets. The enemy’s machine is not simply a device in a German airplane. ‘We are truly. like black boxes with inputs and outputs and no access to our or anyone else’s inner life. one must comes to grips with a new reality. systems theory. Peter Galison calls the Manichean sciences and what Tiqqun calls the Cybernetic Hypothesis (cybernetics. behaviourism. they articulate only their exterior grammar. for our skins are already tattooed. it is a function defined exclusively through its inputs and outputs. cellular automata. a card reader at a security check point. in this view of the world. game theory. ‘[T]he cybernetic philosophy was premised on the opacity of the Other. it became more and more clear that the black box was not simply an isolated device. Is this the death of Freud and Marx and hermeneutics in general? At the very least one might say that Marx’s principle for the commodity has finally come full circle.’ writes Galison. operations research. Computer scientists quite proudly. The black box is no longer a cipher waiting to be unveiled and decoded. Today instead of Marx’s famous rational kernel in the mystical shell. even as the kernel remains absolutely illegible. following Norbert Wiener. The shell is rational.

The power behind the ‘no demands’ posture is precisely that it makes no claim about power at all. This is why one must invert the logic of Marx’s famous mandate to ‘descend into the hidden abode of production. there is a new political posture today.Communization and its Discontents ‘each host sees its network as a single entity. We don’t want political representation. We have no demands. assuming of course that everything is in its place and up and running. what’s left? From the student occupations at the New School. while interiority matters very little. and to repeat: It is no longer a question of illuminating the black box by decoding it. the nature of the consumer. the network may be treated as a “black box” to which a set of hosts is connected. On the contrary. they do not have essences or transcendental cores. from maquiladoras to PC rooms. these black sites are part and parcel of the new industrial infrastructure. to the political tracts circulating through the University of California. to leave being. and perhaps more importantly. These black boxes have a purely functional being. a new political bloc with an acute black-box profile. to Tiqqun and the Invisible Committee and other groups. that is. Instead it seeks to upend the power
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.’213 This new industrial scenario is one in which a great premium is placed on interface. for only by describing this new structural relationship can we begin to speak about the structure of critique. The point instead is to describe the qualitative shift in both the nature of production. The new mantra is: we have no demands. We don’t want collective bargaining. We want to leave be. In other words. if Marx’s ‘descend into the hidden abode of production’ was an allegory for critique itself. We don’t want a seat at the table. To be clear. but rather that of functionalizing the black box by programming it.’ In other words. what is the proper allegory for critique today? If neither the descent into production nor the illumination of hiddenness are viable options. the point is not to ignore the existence of the new black sites of production.

or the great 1900 media (as Kittler calls them). and all the other temporally serial recorders of empirical inputs. or Einstein’s scientific treatment of time. the phonograph.’214
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. And indeed it was Jameson who put forward the notion that postmodernism is not simply a historical periodization but quite literally the spatialization of culture. only to be supplanted after World War II by space as a new organising principle? We can speak therefore first of an aesthetics and politics of time. a development so startling that it must only be balanced and recuperated with an equally temporal counterpart in the diachronic. even Benjamin with his interest in nostalgia and reproduction.’ of ‘territorialization’s’ and ‘lines of flight. Sarkozy. which we should remember is the language of Lenin just as much as it is the language of Bush. the cinema.’ of ‘heterotopias’ and ‘other spaces. and all the rest.’ fuelled in part by Henri Lefebvre’s landmark The Production of Space (1974). not as a so-called engine of history.No Future? circuit entirely via political nonparticipation. the anti-temporal. a ‘spatial dialectic. So by the 1970s and ’80s we hear of ‘situations’ and ‘geographies. The subsequent breakthrough of structuralism then was not so much the elaboration of the linguistic structure. but also achieving central importance in the work of Bergson and Heidegger. Nevertheless if the earlier phase introduced a politics of time. back to Hegel and Darwin and Marx to be sure. the post-war period ushered in a new politics of space. It would be wrong to cast this aside using the typical epithets of cynicism or nihilism. for the key to this new political stance is in its subtractivism vis-à-vis the dimensions of being. but the synchronic as such. Obama. and hence his more recent call for a reinvention of the dialectic itself.’ of ‘nomadic’ wanderings and ‘temporary autonomous zones. Are we not today at the end of a grand declension narrative beginning over a century ago from time to space and now to appearance itself ? Is not the nineteenth and early twentieth century the moment in which time enters western thought. or even to explain it away using the language of state power versus terrorism. but as an engine of spatiality.

Communization and its Discontents This dimensional subtractivism. it reduces all politics to the on/off logic of appearance and disappearance. multiplicity. in fact the ‘interface’ between them is defined exclusively through the impossibility of interfacing: the positive term carries an inordinate amount of power while the negative term carries an extreme burden of invisibility and alterity. between state power and the terrorists. etc. leads to a third step. the proposition: the politics of the new millennium are shaping up to be a politics not of time or of space but of appearance. Today’s politics then is a kind of rampant ‘dark Deleuzianism’ in which affirmation of pure positivity and the concomitant acceptance of the multiple in all its variegated forms (Deleuze’s univocal being as the absolutely singular One. or Levinas’s On Escape. or even the old vulgar economist truism that the so-called computer revolution is less the rise of computing as a new industrial vanguard but the wholesale reorganization of all sectors of industry around these new digital devices such that agriculture and logistics and medicine and what have you are now equally computerized. the politics of the singular dimension. Lyotard’s The Inhuman. for unlike the zeros and ones of the computer. These are of course the stakes of any periodization theory whatsoever. supplementarity.) has come to be associated with a certain historical incarnation of the mode of production. if we can call it that. not so much to assert that computers have taken over. which share a basic numeric symmetry at the level of simple arithmetic. populated with infinite multiplicities) results nevertheless in the thing it meant to eradicate: a strict binarism between us and them. but that a certain kind of logic (binary. So instead of Debord or Jameson or Lefebvre a new radical syllabus is shaping up today: Virilio’s The Aesthetics of Disappearance. The ‘no demands’ posture flies in the face of all of this. is that today’s binary is ultimately a false binary. The perverse irony. Again. the binaries of offline and online are so radically incompatible that they scarcely interface at all. between the wired world and the dark continents. Binary in nature. Instead of a politicization of time or space we are witnessing a rise in the politicization of absence – and presence – ori246
. from time to space.

informatic capture and the making-present of data (via data mining). one might expect to see a new politics of being. Rather. of circulation. and using the language of ontology. or the tactics of nonexistence and disappearance. then. at my own peril to be sure. it is not simply that a new ‘cultural logic’ has been secreted from the mode of production than it is a claim about logic itself (a logic of logic). ‘There is a politics of the unrepresentable. new struggles around prevention. or the relationship between identification and legibility. I shall indulge in that most dismal science of prediction.’217 Strictly speaking then. Sequentially speaking. but rather a question of opacity and unreadability. near or far. Here is the Invisible Committee on the superiority of tactics of opacity over tactics of space: For us it’s not about possessing territory. which is to say from time to extension (space) to ontics (presence/existence). that is to say not simply a politics of durational or historical authenticity or territorial dominance or even identification and appearance. We don’t want to occupy the territory. So in the future. and anonymity. And to be neat and tidy about things. just as ontology is the science of being. and of solidarities to the point that the territory becomes unreadable. piracy and contagion. opaque to all authority. the therapeutics of the body.215 It is no coincidence that groups like Tiqqun use anonymous umbrella names for their practice. Tracking this current from the higher attributes downward. for logic is the science of appearing. but quite literally
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. after ontics comes ontology. As McKenzie Wark writes in his fine book A Hacker Manifesto.No Future? ented themes such as invisibility. we want to be the territory. opacity. a politics of the presentation of the nonnegotiable demand. it’s a matter of increasing the density of the communes.216 The question here is very clearly not one of territorial ‘autonomy’ (Hakim Bey) or a reimagining of space (the Situationists). we ought to remember that these new digital devices are all logic machines to begin with.

but struggles over the politics of being. It will be a materialist politics to be sure. but also at the same time an immaterial or idealist war in which that old spectre of the ‘thought crime’ will certainly rear its ugly head again. leaving us wondering whether we really want what we wished for. process. a binary so lopsided that it turns into a kind of policed monism.’ Not just skirmishes over the politics of the body (which in the overdeveloped world have been evacuated to nothingness by all the limp affectivists with their body modifications and designer pharmaceuticals). so lopsided that the subjugated term is practically nonexistent. a mere pseudo technique floated with the understanding it will be recouped. and that synthesis itself is a mirage. As Godard famously said: ‘this is not a just image. but rather that of the asymmetrical binary.Communization and its Discontents a newfound struggle over what is and what can be. The determining aspect of the dialectic today is not so much contradiction as such or synthesis or negation or even the group of terms related to becoming. This will not resemble the twentieth-century critiques around essentialism and antiessentialism. Substitute the activist mantra ‘no one is illegal’ with ‘no being is illegal. this is just an image.’ So if anything can be learned from the present predicament it might be that a practical nonexistence can emerge from a being that is practically nonexistent. Substitute prevention with preemption. or historicity. or those mining for consumer essences deep within the Amazon web site. be they the champions of the open source movement. as the ‘source fetishists’ are already running rampant. and people will be put in jail for ideas and forms and scripts and scriptures (which is already happening in and around the new regime of digital copyright and the aggressive policing of immaterial property rights). or those bioprospecting for new genetic sources deep within the Amazon jungle. What this means for criticism is another question altogether.
248
. for postfordism put an end to that discussion once and for all. like a day trader floating a short term investment. that subtractive being (n . And perhaps the future is already here.1) might be the only thing today that capitalism cannot eventually co-opt.

249
. we shall not say that there is a new blackness. We shall not ratify the rise of the obscure and the fall of the transparent. But do not decry the reverse either. Simply withdraw from the decision to ask the question. or are we on the side of it? Is this just a new kind of nihilism? Not at all. Instead ask: what is this eternity? What is this black box – this black bloc – that fills the world with husks and hulls and camouflage and crime? Is it our enemy.No Future? To end. it is the purest form of love.

.

Contributors
.

.

written in collaboration with Eugene Thacker. 2007). examines the restructuring of the labor process during the 1960s and 1970s from the point of view of experimental poetry and conceptual art. but core threads so far have been the theory of communization. Most recently he is cotranslator (with Jason Smith) of Introduction to Civil War (Semiotext(e). His research interests include contemporary ultra-left and post-autonomist theory. He is author of three books including The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (Minnesota. the Marxian critique of political economy and recent developments in value-form theory and ‘systematic dialectic’. Alexander R. Starsdown. It emphasises open-ended enquiry. Galloway is an author and programmer. He is a founding member of the software collective RSG and creator of the Carnivore and Kriegspiel projects.Jasper Bernes is a PhD student at UC Berkeley.
253
. His dissertation. Endnotes is a communist theoretical journal produced by a discussion group of the same name based in Britain and the US. Maya Andrea Gonzalez is a revolutionary Marxist Feminist from the Bay Area. John Cunningham is a writer based in London who has contributed to Mute magazine. The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization. He is the author of a book of poems. environmentalism and the representation of production and wage labor in contemporary cinema. 2010) by the French collective Tiqqun.

Benjamin Noys teaches at the University of Chichester and his most recent work is The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Cultural Theory (2010). Nicole Pepperell is Program Director for the Social Science (Psychology) program at RMIT University in Melbourne. Australia. art. and particularly its intersections with cultural production. and was a contributor to the French journal for communization. immanent social critique.Anthony Iles is a writer and editor preoccupied with noise. ‘Meeting’. film. Her research interests include Marx and Marxism. Leon de Mattis is the author of Mort à la démocratie (L’Altiplano. the philosophy of history. Social Science. 2007). housing. His research traverses the field of critical theory. Setting out from a critique of the struggles of the late 1960s-early 1970s and the Dutch-German and Italian communist lefts. the journal has worked on overcoming a conception of the revolution and of communism as the liberation of labor and the affirmation of the proletariat. where she is also Lecturer in Social Theory for the school of Global Studies. He is a contributing editor to Mute and occasional teacher at Det Jyske Akademie in Aarhus. and the relationship between changes in everyday practices and the development of novel political ideals and theoretical categories. and Planning. urban planning and fiction. Théorie Communiste is a French journal founded in 1977. work. The reworking of the concept of
254
.

That is. University of London on speculation as a mode of production. He is the author of Combined and Uneven Apocalypse (Zero Books. Evan Calder Williams is a theorist and graduate student in Santa Cruz. 2010). philosophy and political economy.
255
. He is the author of The Theatre of Production (Palgrave. Alberto Toscano is senior lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths. Marina Vishmidt is a writer active mainly in the fields of contemporary art. the abolition of classes and genders in the production of immediate inter-individual relations. 2011). and a member of the editorial board of Historical Materialism. California. She is doing a PhD at Queen Mary.exploitation as the historical course of the contradiction between classes leads to a characterisation of the restructuring of the capitalist mode of production following the crisis of the 1970s as a cycle of struggles which bears communization as its overcoming. 2006) and Fanaticism: The Uses of an Idea (Verso.

.

.

Notes
.

259
.

The Making of the English Working Class [1963] (London: Penguin. ‘The History of Subsumption’. Collected Fictions. 1978-79. trans. October 59 (Winter 1992): 3-7. Gilles Deleuze.413415. 1019-1038. 2005). ‘What are we to do?’ and Leon de Mattis’s ‘Reflections on the Call’. ‘The Glass Floor’. ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’ [1990]. For the emphasis on the continuing co-existence of formal and real subsumption see Endnotes. 1. http://www. abolish classes. TC. trans. for ‘communizing’ critiques of Tiqqun on these grounds. in its contradiction with capital within the capitalist mode of production. pp. that is to say: produce communism?’. pp.uk/ issues/1. Endnotes 2 (April 2010): 130-152.
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
Théorie Communiste. Ernest Mandel.152. intro. and therefore itself. 2008). and now published as Michel Foucault. See E. Karl Marx. A Thousand Plateaus. ‘How can the proletariat. 1976).org. 1991) for this argument. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.se/ wiki/en/theorie_communiste/the_glass_floor. and intro. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France. P. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave. Thompson.riff-raff. Andrew Hurley (London: Pen-
11
260
. 941-1084. for the distinction between formal and real subsumption see pp. This was presciently explored in Michel Foucault’s lectures on biopolitics (actually on neoliberalism) given between 1978 and 1979. Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin. Jorge Luis Borges. in this collection.uk/articles/6.org. trans. riff-raff. Capital vol. p. acting strictly as a class of this mode of production. For the debate between TC and Dauvé and Nesic on this point see the collection of texts in Endnotes 1 (October 2008). trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. http://endnotes. http://endnotes. ‘The History of Subsumption’. quoted in Endnotes.Introduction
1
See Endnotes.

The Coming Insurrection.info/. a contributor to ‘continental philosophy’.
13 14
The following discussion will focus specifically on are The Invisible Committee. CA: Semiotext(e).org/call. and Fichte likewise need not have perfected his passport regulations to the point of ‘constructing’. p.org. http://afterthefallcommuniques. see ‘Misery and Debt’.’ Hegel.wordpress. http://www.bloom0101. since it is these texts that have been the most influential in the current Anglophone reception of ‘communization’. Tiqqun distinguish their approach from the ‘leftist’ problematic of ‘what is to be done?’ because they see this as denying that ‘the war has
19
261
. 2009) http://tarnac9.21. for example. 263-264.org. They protest too much. http:// endnotes.com/texts/the-coming-insurrection/ and The Invisible Committee. The Coming Insurrection (Los Angeles.guin Books. rather than any more general assessment of Tiqqun as.uk/articles/13.
12
Tiqqun.
16
‘Plato could well have refrained from recommending nurses never to stand still with children but to keep rocking them in their arms.
15
For a discussion of the concept of programmatism. Elements of the Philosophy of Right.uk/ issues/2.101: ‘All milieus are counterrevolutionary because they are only concerned with the preservation of their sad comfort’.
18
Of course. the requirement that the passport of suspect persons should carry not only their personal description but also their painted likeness. http://endnotes. rather than other works associated with Tiqqun. see Theorié Communiste.org/call.
What are we to do?
See for example the collection After the Fall: Communiqués from Occupied California.bloom0101.
For a fuller discussion of these issues. http://www.pdf. and ‘Crisis in the Class Relation’ in Endnotes 2 (April 2010). ‘Much Ado About Nothing’. 1998). It is primarily with this reception that we are concerned. for example. ‘Call’.pdf. Endnotes 1: Preliminary Materials for a Balance Sheet of the Twentieth Century (October 2008): 154-206. as the expression ran. pp. Call (2004). p.
17
See.

http://riff-raff. Riff-Raff 9 (March 2011). and a definancialization of productive capital). pp.. this would mean a renationalization of economies. the direct question to be posed for Tiqqun is ‘how is it to be done’? But we are not merely concerned with this question as literally posed by Tiqqun.29-34. superseding / preserving globalization. any communist revolution. the privatisation of land in China and the disappearance of small holdings and tenant farming in India) but also and above all on a reconfiguration of the global cycle of capital. English translation forthcoming.
25
These examples are mostly French. supplanting the present globalization (i. The ‘what should we do?’ in question is that of the post-anti-globalization impasse itself. pp.
Communization in the Present Tense
For China and India to manage to constitute themselves as their own internal market would depend on a veritable revolution in the countryside (i.se/ texts/sv/om-marcel-crusoes-exkommunister-i-intermundia.e. Ett bidrag till kommuniseringsdiskussionen’.already begun’. and prior to.
21 22 23 24
The Coming Insurrection. p. ‘Om Marcel Crusoes exkommunister i Intermundia.
26
It is a crisis in which the identity of overaccumulation and of under-consumption asserts itself.
27 28
‘(T)hat thing [money] is an objectified relation between persons (. publication of this text in Britain and the United States provides an opportunity to test the theses that are defended here.33-32.) it is
262
. The Coming Insurrection. Call. we refer to practices which aim to establish liberated areas outside of capitalist domination. Countercultural milieus in general can be said to be ‘alternativist’. an impasse which – as we shall see – structures the theoretical content of texts such as Call and The Coming Insurrection.. By ‘alternative’ and ‘alternativism’ here. Instead.
20
For an excellent critique of the position of the Batko group see Per Henriksson.e.4. grasping this as possible independently of.

‘communizing movement’ and ‘communizing current’ are used in the sense that I respectively gave them in Meeting 1 (‘Three Theses on Communization’). an experience.communisation.fr/ii/index. Troploin 4 (September 2004). 160. http://troploin0.php/textes/19communisation-un-appel-et-une-invite. the simple concomitance of the two projects should inspire at the very least a reciprocal interest among their respective participants.objectified exchange value. 1973).
Reflections on the Call
Presented at ‘Meeting 2’ (2005). Grundrisse (Harmondsworth: Penguin. The ‘communizing current’ designates the theoretical groups which explicitly employ the concept of communization as an important pole of their reflection (this current being admittedly relatively restricted for the moment). It characterizes those moments of the class struggle where the central problematic was something close to what one could at present understand by communization: in short. That which signals the
263
. Dauvé concludes his text by writing: ‘If the situation corresponds to that described by those preparing Meeting and those who’ve published Call.net/archives/meeting-no-2/les-textes-publies-6/article/reflexions-autour-de-l-appel.
30
Gilles Dauvé and Karl Nesic.pdf.
31 32
The expressions ‘area which poses the question of communization’. The original French text available here: http://meeting. how to realize the immediacy of social relations.
29
‘Call’ was published by The Invisible Committee in 2004.’ He also adds. Certain articles of Meeting 1 and Call concern strictly the same topics. in particular in the anti-globalization actions of recent years. this text manifests an existence.free. bloom0101. and that the ‘experience’ which Call represents can also be found in Meeting.’ It is necessary to point out here that the ‘concomitance’ of these projects has nothing fortuitous about it. ‘The area which poses the question of communization’ incorporates a much larger part of the present and past proletarian movement. ‘Communization: a “call” and an “invite”’.org/call.’ Marx. and exchange value is nothing more than a mutual relation between people’s productive activities. references in the text are given to the English translation available here: http://www. To our knowledge this is not the case. in relation to Call: ‘Whatever reservations we can hold. p.

in this type of struggle.cit.existence of this area is the crystallization around the communizing question at a given moment in a given struggle. Meeting 1 (2004). in order to highlight the distinction between the ‘we’ of the party (NOUS) from the more abstract and impersonal ‘we’ of society / the citizen (ON). but for commoners) thus allows for a Heideggerian distinction which is not translatable into German or English.
There will be an exchange of blows with the cops. ‘Das Man’. op. without thinking that this portion of the proletariat could exist separately or perpetuate itself beyond the class struggle in general.
33 34 35
Dauvé. Leon de Mattis. is an attempt to respond to a particular problem. The terms are translated throughout by ‘alternative’. option between reform and revolution.
38
I talk of ‘questions’ because every practice.net/archives/meeting-no-1/les-textes-publies/ article/trois-theses-sur-la-communisation. although it is more literally rendered by its French translation ‘le On’ (the one). ‘Trois thèses sur la communisation’. Finally the ‘communizing movement’ is something to be created. nous and on. some trashed hotel lobbies and many trashed brothels in the city center – and also a lot of arrests. is generally translated into English as ‘the They’. some trials (including one protester sentenced to a four-month stretch) and an order of the Prefecture of the Rhine which banned all demonstrations in the city center.
39
264
.
36
Translators note: Call capitalizes the two French versions of ‘we’.communisation. Translators note: in French radical circles the terms ‘l’alternatif ’ and ‘alternativisme’ designate the activity of those who believe it possible to fulfill their desire for change within capitalist society.
37
Translators note: Heidegger’s term for inauthentic being. ‘drop out’. Debates must be provoked in the midst of this area – in the struggles and the moments where the communizing problematic seems to appear – to form a movement which will make this demand explicit in the heart of these struggles. The common usage of ‘on’ to mean ‘we’ (a little like the ‘royal we’. a few broken windows and cameras. alongside the mainstream in an alternative or countercultural world – a kind of third. http://meeting.

Tout a failli. as viewed in retrospect from the perspective of communization theory.
44 45 46
See Histoire critique de l’ultra-gauche.
43
Rosa Luxemburg.
Theorié Communiste. p. and charmingly acerbic. 73. Endnotes 2 (April 2010). of an ‘expatriation’ of Marxism.Now and Never
40 41
Tiqqun. are among the more obvious examples. in Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism (Leiden: Brill.
42
On the idea. http://endnotes. 2010). ‘Reform or Revolution’. ‘Stratégie et politique: de Marx à la 3e Internationale’. 2010) and David Harvey. ed. 1970).
For a very useful. ‘Communization in the Present Tense’ (this volume). 2007). and Badiou’s against the PCF. Endnotes 1 (2008). pp. 2009).org. Trajectoire d’une balle dans le pied (Paris: Éditions Senonevero. p. pp. 2008). vive le communisme! (Paris: La Fabrique.
47
See the whole of the first issue of Endnotes for the documents of the debate between the invariant-humanist (Gilles Dauvé and Karl Nesic of Troploin) and historical-anti-humanist (TC) wings of communization theory. drawn from Badiou’s writings of the 1980s.
Endnotes. Mary-Alice Waters (New York: Pathfinder Press. Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt (Berkeley: University of California Press. in La politique comme art stratégique (Paris: Éditions Syllepse. Uneven Development: Nature. third edition (London: Verso. Capital and the Production of Space.
49
For some recent and relevant work on this. 51-128. Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical
51
265
. ‘Communisation and Value Form Theory’. 95. 529-48. see Ching Kwan Lee. see my ‘Marxism Expatriated: Alain Badiou’s Turn’. 2009).
48
Daniel Bensaïd.
50
See especially Neil Smith. survey of the ultra-Left varieties of this phenomenon.uk/issues/1. Negri’s vitriol against the PCI. see (Roland Simon/Chemins non tracés) Histoire critique de l’ultra-gauche. in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks.

487.
54
See for example Carl Boggs. Hegemony and Marxism (Leiden: Brill.
52
‘The immediate economic element (crises. see the stimulating reflections on the uses of dead labor in Moishe Postone. 2001). etc. Le Démocratisme radical (Paris: Éditions Senonevero. 2. or at least an important victory in the context of the strategic line. in a flash they organize one’s own troops and create the necessary cadres – or at least in a flash they put the existing cadres (formed. p. after throwing him into disarray and causing him to lose faith in himself. they breach the enemy’s defences. 1971). 1993). 361. Time. by the general historical process) in positions which enable them to encadre one’s scattered forces.
57 58
‘The proper management of constituted environments … may therefore
266
.6 (1977) and 12. and his future.1 (1978). Naturally the effects of immediate economic factors in historical science are held to be far more complex than the effects of heavy artillery in a war of maneuver. Labor and Social Domination: A reinterpretation of Marx’s critical theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. It was thus out and out historical mysticism. with the aggravating factor that it was conceived of as operating with lightning speed in time and in space. This view was a form of iron economic determinism. Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence & Wishart.
55
See Peter Thomas’s excellent The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy. 2009). Radical America 11.Development (London: Verso. and the Problem of Workers’ Control’. ‘Marxism. his forces.
53
For these arguments. in a flash they bring about the necessary ideological concentration on the common objective to be achieved. the awaiting of a sort of miraculous illumination.) is seen as the field artillery which in war opens a breach in the enemy’s defences – a breach sufficient for one’s own troops to rush in and obtain a definitive (strategic) victory. until that moment.1 (2006). see Roland Simon. p. since they are conceived of as having a double effect: 1. I’ve tried to explore the present relevance of this problematic in ‘Dual Power Revisited: From Civil War to Biopolitical Islam’. Soft Targets. 2.
56
On a purely theoretical rather than strategic plane. Prefigurative Communism. 2006).’ Antonio Gramsci. 3.

in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics.: Stanford University Press. 1971). Jephcott (Stanford.nuim. The key textual references are Marx’s ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’ and Lenin’s gloss on it in State and Revolution.
63
Christopher J. David Harvey. 2010). Interface: a journal for and about social movements.). 2 (1): 243 . in ‘The Politics of Abstraction: Communism and Philosophy’. Time.ie/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Interface-2-1-pp243-261-Harvey.require transitional political institutions. I speak of necessary alienation (or necessary separation) by analogy with Marcuse’s distinction between necessary and surplus repression in Eros and Civilization. trans. available at: http://interfacejournal. Nature and the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell. See also Harvey’s important recent intervention. 2002). 1996). and commensuration through value.pdf.
Georg Lukács.261 (May 2010). Adorno. This is so because. R. Boston: Brill. p. The Idea of Communism (London: Verso. M.159. The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital (Leiden. Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft). trans. 186.
60
Capitalism: Some Disassembly Required
61
Karl Marx. Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of
267
. Justice. Livingstone (London: Merlin Press. hierarchies of power relations. and systems of governance that could well be anathema to both ecologists and socialists alike.
62
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. there is nothing unnatural about New York city and sustaining such an ecosystem even in transition entails an inevitable compromise with the forms of social organization and social relations which produced it’.
64 65
Moishe Postone. p. in a fundamental sense. CA.83. in Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek (eds. E. Arthur. trans.
59
I’ve discussed this in terms of the question of equality. 1973). 2004). p. ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’. ‘Organizing for the Anticapitalist Transition’.

Théorie Communiste. p.
132 133
Théorie Communiste.). p. Ibid.The Double Barricade and the Glass Floor ‘The condition of the development of the forces of production as long as they requires an external spur. Since écart also means ‘gap’ we are meant to understand this phrase as implying that acting as a class.net/spip. Grundrisse (London: Penguin. entails a certain distance (or gap) from oneself. ed. The translation of écart as swerve here capture only part of the meaning.415.
The best introduction to the ideas of Théorie Communiste and the context from which they emerge can be found in the conversation between Aufheben and TC in ‘Communist Theory: Beyond the Ultra-left’. Normality is Beyond US’.communization. ‘The Present Moment’.421.
134 135
Ibid. Elsewhere TC identify theory as itself the product of the gap created by new forms of class struggle. it then becomes an obstacle which the revolution has to overcome’. ‘Self-organization is the first act of the revolution. Occupied London.1 (n. under such conditions. Revue Internationale pour la Communization (2005).d. Sic 1. http://sic. http://meeting.org/library/beyond-ultra-left-aufheben-11 and in the introduction and afterword to Endnotes 1 (2008). Aufheben 11 (2003). English translation here: http://www. 2009). in Les Emeutes en Grèce (Senonevero.
Théorie Communiste.’ Karl Marx.riff-raff. A
272
.
136
Ibid.se/wiki/en/theorie_communiste/the_glass_floor.communization.org. thus putting one’s identity into question.php?page=imprimir_articulo&id_article=72. ‘Reality is an Illusion.
129 130 131
Marx. ‘Le plancher de verre’. http://libcom. 1993). which appears at the same time as their bridle.net/en/the-present-moment. http://endnotes. Grundrisse.
137 138 139
Ibid.uk/ issues/1.

pp. communization. point of condensation. Amanda Armstrong and Paul Nadal. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin Books. http://theoriecommuniste. references throughout are from: Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft). The Society of the Spectacle (Cambridge. is simply ‘formation of those without reserves.225-226. org/issue01_armstrong_nadal.
145
Original title in French is Capital et Gemeinswesen.
141
See the following account of the Wheeler occupation.pdf. 2011).). 1973).marxists. is available online at: http:// www.htm. ‘Who We Are’. which attempts to read the day as an example of ‘care’ just as much as antagonism. of a community. p.
146
Camatte’s definition of ‘proletarianization’.net/English/Presentation.
140
http://wewanteverything. This is Not a Program (Semiotext(e).html.
144
Other than any position that could utter phrases about the emancipatory potential of either YouTube or the sort of desperate networks of informal labor in slums: to affirm this is utter stupidity. from which passages are drawn. and resource/support structure.d. the section ‘Living-and-Fighting’.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/a-day-whennothing-is-certain. http:// www.17/Who-we-are
143
Fire to the Commons ‘The commons’ may be understood as a material organization.
142
Théorie Communiste. Reclamations 1 (December 2009). for one of the most trenchant reflections on this problem. Mass: Zone Books.’
147
The well-known passage from Marx.occupiedlondon.
148
273
. (n. can be found in Grundrisse.com/2009/09/24/communique-froman-absent-future/. See also. http://reclamationsjournal. English translation by David Brown. 1995). trans.org/archive/camatte/capcom/index. which forms the basis of this investigation. from Tiqqun. ‘Building Times: How Lines of Care Occupied Wheeler Hall’. in the 1970 remarks to Capital and Community. Guy Debord.14.wordpress.Day When Nothing is Certain: Writings on the Greek Insurrection.

The ‘without reserves’ (senza-riserve) and the universal class are Bordigist concepts employed by Camatte.php?gid=43581396610. pp. 1997). Make Total Destroy Facebook Page. Antagonism Press.Note: in the discussion that follows.com/group. Namely. in which ‘man’ stands in for a restricted notion of what counts as ‘our common essence. while the real content of man – laborpower – enters into the economic movement. to say that ‘man is time’s carcass’ is to speak specifically of the dominant notion of ‘man’ and the material practices that aim to reduce the entire range of human experience to that restricted zone. I use ‘human’ to describe a wider field of the species. http://www. The Eclipse and Re. I guard the specifically gendered term ‘man’ that Marx and Camatte use. its standard is abstract man.
156
274
. Ibid. Conversely. This is in part for consistency with the texts I am discussing. In other words. The former is juxtaposed to the mistaken notion of the ‘reserve army of labor’ and functions as a way to understand the production of surplus populations with nothing to fall upon and which cannot be adequately ‘incorporated’ by capital. 1998). p.Emergence of the Communist Movement [1974] (London.36.’ with the particular pitfalls of essentializing and the dominant historical figuration of the worker (especially the revolutionary worker) as specifically male.
149
Camatte himself. points to a reading of labor power as the ‘real content of man’: ‘Democracy is comparison par excellence. However.
155
Gilles Dauvé and Francois Martin.facebook. I use ‘man’ to signal the discussion of a figure particular to capital and the history of its theorization (man as labor power and attendant potential ‘rights’).. but more in order to draw a terminological distinction.157. Make Total Destroy
154
Walter Benjamin. The universal class is an extension of this notion to include the ‘new middle classes’ – those who are a ‘representation of surplus value’ – in a version of a proletarianization thesis. in Capital and Community. in One Way Street (London and New York: Verso.452-435. ‘The Destructive Character’. p.’
150 151 152 153
Marx Grundrisse. p.324.

it then becomes an obstacle which the revolution has to overcome.173 174
Michael Denning. p. http://libcom.86. 1988).34.). ‘Critique of Violence’. 2007). New Left Review 66 (2010). p. 144.
185
Théorie Communiste.
183 184
See Gilles Dauvé (a.org.86. The Glass Floor. for a critique of the Situationists that emphasises this – given that Agamben is influenced by Debord it seems the elision of production in favour of a concentration upon commodification continues in his elaboration of spectacular capitalism. p. http://libcom.
181 182
Dauvé and Martin.
175 176 177
Théorie Communiste. I’d also like to thank Aaron Benanav for his help in editing this piece. 145-6. The College of Sociology 1937-39 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
See ‘Misery and Debt’. Self-organization is the first act of the revolution. ‘Crisis Activity and Communization’. pp. ‘In Praise of Profanation’. Agamben. p. ‘Wageless Life’. 1997. Making Sense of the Situationists (1979).79.
Communization and the Abolition of Gender Thanks to Francesca Manning for her invaluable help in working through the ideas in this text. in Profanations (New York: Zone Books. Endnotes 2 (2010): 20-51.uk/ articles/1. Self-organization is the first act of the revolution. Jean Barrot).org/ library/crisis-activity-communisation-bruno-astarian. p. Benjamin.a.
179 180
Bruno Astarian.k. Théorie Communiste. Benjamin.418.
178
Giorgio Agamben. p. ‘In Praise of Profanation’. http://endnotes. for an analysis of the tendency towards a population surplus to the requirements of capital. Pierre Klossowski in Denis Hollier (ed.org/ library/self-organization-is-the-first-act-of-the-revolution-it-then-becomesan-obstacle-which-the-revolution-has-to-overcome.
186
276
. ‘Critique of Violence’.

org.See ‘Misery and Debt’. New Left Review I/167 ( Jan-Feb 1988): 3-20. Sex in Question (London: Taylor and Francis. New Left Review I/144 (Mar-Apr 1984): 33-71. ‘Natural Fertility. and Oxford: Blackwell. maybe some ‘men’ do. see Makotoh Itoh. ‘The Present Moment’.uk/ articles/1. sometimes carried out by women themselves. see Massimo Livi-Bacci. uk/issues/1. see Endnotes 1 (2008). in Diana Leonard and Lisa Adkins. http://endnotes. The Japanese Economy Reconsidered (Palgrave 2000). For a more developed theory of women’s relation to property. ‘Capitalism and Human Emancipation’.
192
For an introduction to demography.
193
Ellen Meiksins Wood. 1992). as distinct from a socialized gender.
These statistics make it clear to what extent violence against women. See Paola Tabet.
195
Johanna Brenner and Maria Ramas. becomes integrated into a social structure – which takes natural averages and turns them into behavioral norms.
Christine Delphy and Diana Leonard. has always been necessary to keep them firmly tied to their role in the sexual reproduction of the species. That does not make them any less beholden to society’s strictures. unpublished. http://endnotes. A Concise History of World Population (Malden. which are sometimes altered at birth to ensure conformity with sexual norms. ‘Rethinking Women’s Oppression’. The point is not to use the language of biology to ground a theory of naturalized sexuality. Mass. including at the level of their very bodies. Forced Reproduction’. Nature.
187
For a key debate on this point. 1996). see ‘Notes
277
.
188 189 190
Théorie Communiste.
196 197 198
Ibid. Familiar Exploitation (Cambridge: Polity Press. Endnotes 2 (2010): 20-51.
194
The term comes from Japan. Not all ‘women’ bear children. 2007). which is without distinction.
191
Not all human beings fit into the categories of male and female.org.

Only Paradoxes to Offer (Cambridge.
202
Radical feminism followed a curious trajectory in the second half of the 20th century.
203
On the history of women’s situation within the workers’ movement. ‘L’Hypothèse cybernétique’. Endnotes 1 (2008). The problem was that in each case. By the middle of the twentieth century. p.
204
Théorie Communiste. p. Tiqqun 2 (2001): 278-285. these feminists sought an ahistorical ground for what had become an historical phenomenon. as well as its timing.. p. Scott. ‘Rethinking Women’s Oppression’. org. and finally sexual violence (or the male orgasm) as the ground of women’s oppression. Bourgeois suffragettes argued for property-based voting qualifications – thus excluding women as class enemies. in Philipp von Hilgers
278
.
210
Philipp von Hilgers. Tiqqun 2 (2001): 40-83.69. Mass.42. Ibid.uk/articles/3. we are of course interested only in the history of women’s situation within the workers’ movement.: Harvard University Press. 80.uk/articles/13. 2002). http://endnotes. taking first childbearing. Endnotes 2 (2010): 52-66.
Ibid. Joan W. http://endnotes.’ particularly in the text ‘Comment faire?’.44. ‘Ursprünge der Black Box’. The ground of this loosening.
In this sense. ‘Much Ado about Nothing’.
199 200 201
Brenner and Ramas. see Geoff Eley. p. has remained inexplicable within the bounds of queer theory.73. See also Tiqqun’s concept of the ‘human strike. 1996). Black Bloc
206 207 208 209
Tiqqun.org..
205
Black Box. emphasis added. Ibid. these same bourgeois became defenders of women’s maternal role – at the same time as they founded organizations to control the bodies of women among the ‘dangerous classes’.on the New Housing Question’.. then domestic work. Forging Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press. p.